Merging EXE files

I know Ill probably be frowned upon and possibly given negative points, but Im going to ask this question anyways. I know you can merge EXE files with other files, so that it looks like the file is not an exe. IE--Make a JPG an EXE file. Sub7 does this. However, is there a program that does the same thing, just without the trojan/virus part to it. Im not going to send viruses out etc. My question is because the webcam I use requires a codec to be installed before viewing AVI files. Sometimes its an endless loop getting people to download and execute the codec and I was wondering if its at all possible to merge two files (one an exe and one an Avi) together, without zipping it. Essentially so that one double click will open the exe and the program will continue to load the AVI once the codecs are installed. Thanks All.

Even if you where to merge 2 files into an exectuable (which involves sticking the other file after the executable and enlarging the file size) this would not work for what you are trying to achieve. I assume you are talking about putting a player plus the avi into one file from which the user would download and then execute and it would play the movie?

This would not work for a number of reasons:-

1. If the avi is in the same file as the player the player would have to be hacked to get it to use an offset in itself to get the video data from and not to open a file.

2. This still wouldn't get around the codec problems as the codecs don't reside in the players exe. They are usually seperate files that are loaded into the players address space at runtime by the player.


The only way i can see of getting this to work is to get the source code for a player and making sure the codec is compiled into the executable or to write your own player :).

Hope this helps.

Peter

I think the easiest would be to convert the avi to something that doesn't need a wierd/hard2find/hard2install codec. There are numerous converters available.

go for MPG :)

there are also commercial (possibly also freeware) programs that can make a sef running movie..
but they usualy use their own codecs and make the files realy big or realy ugly !!

Thanks all for the help. I was thinking about just converting the file, and do the work myself. In reply to Psky, you got the basics of what I am trying to do but with the codec, I would want it to install to the media player directory. Only problem becomes, what if they dont use media player as their default player. Then Im screwed. Thanks all for the info though.

Well if you are hell bent on using the AVI format with the codec you could make a self extracting archive that would immediately launch the codec installation. I know that you mentioned that you don't want to zip files but I cannot see any other easy and quick way to do this.

Sorry :(

many programming dev. kits come with very nice package builders. you could simply build an installation for your files?

i was a little hurried when i read this but i got that u wanted 2 merge an .exe w/ a .jpg to conceal the executable. in windoze u can do this @ a dos command prompt & .jpg still functions ;)

copy filename.jpg /b + filename.exe /b >newfile.jpg /b

Thanks all for the help, specially the JPG thing. Appreciate it all.