How to join videos without re-encoding?

[manthing]

say i have a retail dvd.
i demux the audio & video from it.

i also have an OTA (off-the-air) recording of the same show/movie/whatever.
i demux this as well.

there are some sections, from my OTA recordings that are not on the retail release.

what i want to do is cut those missing bits from my OTA recordings and "join/add" it to the retail version in the appropriate places.

what tool will allow me to do this and not re-encode the resulting video?
i don't want to erode the quality of the retail video if possible.

or if re-encoding cannot be avoided, then which tool does the least harm?

thanks.

[admin]

Joining video clips can only be done if the specs of the videos match.
In the case of MPEG-2 video, the specs must be "close enough" to coexist within the flagged MPEG container.

So ... run a Gspot analysis for me. See Gspot Codec Analysis Tool - AVI codec info [DOWNLOAD]

From that, I'll know if it's possible to merge as-is, without a re-encode.

My gut feeling says you'll have to re-encode at least one clip. Given that retail source is better for encoding abuse, it would likely be the clip that needs a re-encode. Then it would match the homemade piece, and you could merge in a good program like Womble MPEG Video Wizard.