FFmpeg – Concat – “Protocol” vs. “Demuxer”

Those two ways are used to concat files with the same codec.

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Concat protocol

… works at the file level. → For files without a header, like MPEG-2 TS.

ffmpeg -i "concat:file1.ts|file2.ts|file3.ts" -c copy movie.mkv

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Concat demuxer

… works at the stream level. → For files with a header, like MKV or MP4.

$ cat files.txt
file 'file1.mkv'
file 'file2.mkv'
file 'file3.mkv'
    
$ ffmpeg -f concat -i files.txt -c copy movie.mkv