DeVeDe, a video DVD creator

Current version: 3.8c

Before sending a bug, please read the FAQ. (thanks).

What is it?

DeVeDe is a program that allows you to create a video DVD from an MPEG, AVI, MOV... video file, suitable for home DVD players. DeVeDe uses Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor and VCDimager, so you can use any video playable with Mplayer.

DISCLAIMER

This software is distributed as is, under the GPL license (version 3 or later), and without warranty of any kind. Use it at your own risk. Press here to read the GPLv3 license.

Installing DeVeDe

To install DeVeDe, first you must ensure you have Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDimager, mkisofs and ImageMagic in your system. You need Python 2.4 or later, PyGTK and PyGlade too. Then, just run the install.sh script as root:

sudo ./install.sh

It will copy all the files at the right place. It should even create an entry in your Gnome/KDE/freedesktop-compatible-windowmanager menu.

For advanced users, there are some extra paremeters that you can pass to the install.sh script (thanks to Patrick Monnerat). These are the --targeted=(yes/no), --uninstall=(yes/no), and the more common ones (--DESTDIR=..., --prefix=...).

The --targeted parameter means that you want to install DeVeDe in a directory different than /usr/local. If you put it to yes you must use --DESTDIR= and --prefix= at least to specify where to store the files.

The --uninstall parameter was a ned due to a mistake in the first versions of DeVeDe. Up to version 2.8, the install.sh script installed DeVeDe in /usr, but starting from version 2.9 it used /usr/local. To avoid problems when an user updates from a version lower than 2.9 to a higher one, by default the install.sh script first uninstall DeVeDe from all possible locations (/usr and /usr/local), and then proceed with the installation itself. This is a good effect until you want to create a .deb or .rpm package. In this case, just add the --uninstall=no parameter and the install.sh script will only do the install process, skipping the previous uninstall.

So if you are a package developer, you should use a command line like:

./install.sh --uninstall=no --targeted=yes --DESTDIR=/var/tmp/blahblah --prefix=/usr

Creating a disk: fast instructions

Before explaining all the options in DeVeDe, I'll give you the common sequence to create a disk.

First, you choose the disk type you want to create (DVD, VCD, sVCD, CVD or DivX). Then, you drag&drop the files you want in the main window, creating (if is a DVD) the titles you want, or add them one-each-time with the Add file button. If you want to add subtitles or fine-tune the properties of a file, you should use the Properties button. Then you should click the Adjust disk usage button to set the video bitrate for each file (which depends on the final size of the file, if it have one or more subtitles, if it's already a converted file...), and finally go ahead and create the disk image.

Description of the interface

The selection window

When you launch DeVeDe, it will show you this window, asking what kind of disk you want to create. You can choose between:

Of course you aren't limited to theses options, since you can choose, if you want, another resolution for your CD/DVD. This allows you to create Super VideoCDs with a resolution of 352x240 (or 352x288 for PAL), which is a very good compromise if you want to store a lot of video in a single CD. I don't recomend to use other resolutions with VideoCDs, because CBR MPEG-1 is very limited. Choose the Super VideoCD or CVD option (which uses VBR MPEG-2) and use there the resolution you want.

The main interface

After choosing the kind of disk you want, you will see the main interface:


Main interface for DVD discs

A DVD is divided in Titles and Files. Each title is a film on its own, and, when played, you have to choose the one you want to see. Into each title you can add as many files as you want, and cut them in chapters to allow an easy search.


Main interface for VCD/SVCD/CVD discs

In VideoCDs, Super VideoCDs and CVDs there's no title concept, so that frame won't be visible when you choose to create one of them.

Main window properties

In the DVD window screenshot we can see that there are two titles, and title two has two files. The files in a title will be played one after another, like a single film. So if you only want to create a DVD with one single film from multiple files, you have to put all of them in a single title. Your player will merge all in a single film.

The File info box contains all the information about the selected file: the final audio an video rate, original and final size, FPS and length in seconds. It has the estimated size in Mbytes, but have in mind that is an estimation, so the final size can be lower (but never higher).

The Disk usage bar shows the percentage of the disk currently used. You can occupy more than the 100% because it's based in an estimation, so the final size can (and probably will) be lower than the espected, but never higher (see the FAQ for details). You can choose the CD/DVD size too. Have in mind another thing: a 700MB CD can contain 80 minutes of compressed audio/video, which, at 1152 kbps are about 800MB. This means that, when the media is a CD, you MUST use the bar to know how many disc space you are using, and no the estimated size of the files, because you can put up to 800MB of compressed video in a 700MB CD, or about 720MB in a 650MB CD.

Under the bar is the Adjust disk usage button. Clicking on it will adjust the video rate in each video in order to use the 100% of the disk. To do so, DeVeDe takes in account the final resolution and the length, giving more bits per second to the videos with a higher resolution, but always in a proportional way. Remember that you should always click again the Adjust disk usage button after changing the final resolution, adding or removing subtitles or, in general, after doing any modification in any video's parameters, in order to assign a good video bit rate to each film

Now, the Action block allows you to choose what do you want to create. The first option,Only convert film files to compliant MPEG files takes each file and converts it to a DVD-compliant MPEG-PS file, or to VCD, SVCD or CVD-compliant MPEG-PS. You can choose a generic name, being the default name "movie", so the files will have names like movie_XX_YY.mpg, being XX the title, and YY the file position into the title. An example: if you have two titles, and two files in the first title and three files at the second title, you will get five files: movie_01_01.mpg, movie_01_02.mpg, movie_02_01.mpg, movie_02_02.mpg and movie_02_03.mpg. This option is specially usefull when you want to create DVD menus with other program like DVD Styler, Q DVD Author or PoliDori. Of course, with VCD, SVCD or CVD, the title number will be always "01".

The second option, Create disk structure, is visible only when you create a DVD. It creates the MPEG files and then uses DVDAuthor to create the DVD tree structure. After that, it erases the MPEG files (unless you unckeck the Erase temporary files button). You can use this option to create the folder and files for a DVD and use your own DVD recording program to create the ISO image and burn it into a DVD.

The third option, (second if you are creating a VCD, SVCD or CVD), Create an ISO or BIN/CUE image, ready to burn to a disk, converts the files to MPEG, creates the DVD tree if needed and, using MKISOFS, creates the ISO file, erasing then the MPEG and DVD tree to free disk space. With CD media, it converts the files to MPEG and uses VCDImager to create a BIN/CUE image, ready to be burned to a CD. Use this option to create a disk image ready to be burned to a CD/DVD with a program like GnomeBaker or K3b, or directly from the Gnome Desktop.

These options will be unavailable when creating DIVX files, because there you will create only files, not disk images.

The next block, options, starts with Erase temporary files, which allows to choose if you want DeVeDe to erase the temporary files as soon as they are needed no more. Selecting it, DeVeDe will need only about twice the final disk space, but if you don't mark it, you will need about three times the final disk space, but you will have all the temporary files.

The next option, Use optimizations for multicore CPUs, when marked, makes Mencoder to use several threads to convert the videos, thus getting advantage of multicore CPUs to run faster.

Menu options

Finally there is the Add a menu with the titles and its asociated buttons. When you check it, DeVeDe will create a menu in the DVD, allowing you to jump to the title you want. Here is the menu that DeVeDe creates from the example, with the first title highlighted:

If you click the Menu options button, you will see this window:

The first block allows you to change the background picture. This way you can create a custom menu for your DVD. In the second block you can choose the format for your menu (PAL or NTSC). This determines the final resolution (720x576 for PAL or 720x480 for NTSC). The third block allows you to choose the possition where you want to put the menu: in the top of the screen, centered, or in the bottom. Finally, the last block allows you to change the font style and size, and the colors used to render the inactive text, the active text and the text background (the inactive and the background colors can have transparency, so you can even remove the background if you want); but be carefull: you can only change the font size, not the button size, so if you make it too big, you will have a menu like this:


You must be carefull with the font size, or you will get incorrect results like this.

The optimal font size is 12 points, but maybe for some special fonts it can be different, so always use the Preview menu button to ensure that everything has the desired size.

Adding a new title

If you press the button Add in the title group, DeVeDe will add a new title with a generic name. Now, if you click the button Properties, you will see the title's properties window:

The first thing you can change here is the title's name. This is important because this name is the one used in the menu.

The second thing you can choose is the action to perform when the player ends playing this title. These options allows to choose the new title which the player will play. This way you can do a title that loops forever, or you can do a disk which, after playing any title, plays the last title too and then jumps to the menu... the possibilites are infinite. Of course, these options works both when the disk has a menu and when it doesn't have it, but in the last case you are limited because you don't have a menu to jump to a specific title (this means that you must set a "lineal" order", or you will be unable to access some titles).

With the arrow keys you can reorder the titles.

Currently you can create DVD discs with up to 12 titles.

Adding movie files to a title

To add a new file you have two options: first, you can drag and drop one or more files into the main window, so DeVeDe will give them some fine default values; or you can choose the "Add" button, so you will see this window:

First you choose the file you want to add (you can do it by drag and drop in this window too). After doing it, you can see its properties at the File info block. You can then choose the format (PAL or NTSC) and, if the movie has more than one audio track (like several languages), you can choose which one you want to use.

Maybe you ask why I put the PAL/NTSC option here and not in the main window. The answer is: because this way you can create hybrid DVDs, with some films in PAL/SECAM format and others in NTSC. What is the utility of this? Simply: modern TV sets and DVD players can play both formats, so if you manually choose the one that fits better the original framerate of the file, you will have an smoother video. This is: if the original file has 24 or 25 fps, select PAL, and if it has 30 fps, select NTSC. Of course you can force one of them and DeVeDe will adjust the framerate to 25 or 30 fps, ensuring that the DVD will have the rigth framerate and will play fine in all TV sets, but maybe the motion won't be not as smooth as it could be.

If you are creating a VCD, sVCD or CVD, you can choose if you want to put the whole file, or only the first or the second half. This is specially usefull when creating VCDs: you can cut a long film in two disks if it's too long to fit in a single disk. But if the length of the film is less than 60 seconds, you won't be able to choose them.

Remember that this option is applied to each file, so if you put two files in a xCD and choose in both the first half, you will have a xCD with the first half of the first file followed by the first half of the second file.

Finally, you can add up to 32 subtitle files, each one with one language. You can use the Add button or just drag&drop a file with subtitles (DeVeDe will check if the extension is .sub, .srt, .ssa, .smi, .txt, .aqt, .jss or .ass). These will be true DVD subtitles, in the sense that you can enable or disable them, and choose the language you want. When you do that, DeVeDe will show you this window:

In File you can choose the file with the subtitles. If you are using subtitle files coded with a codepage different than ISO-8859-1 (or pure ASCII) you will have to choose the right Codepage (UTF-8 is twice in the list to make it easier to find).

You must choose the language too. This allows the DVD player to show the language code when you enable the subtitles.

Finally, the option "Put subtitles upper" makes DeVeDe to render the subtitles a little upper that normally. This is fine when you have a 16:9 film in 3:4 format (with black bars up and down) and want to use the ZOOM option in your TV without loosing the subtitles, or when your TV is old and misses too many lines in bottom and cuts the ordinary subtitles.

Have in mind that if you preview a video from DeVeDe with subtitles, they will be shown in order to allow you to ensure that the sincronization is fine (needs MPlayer 1.0rc1 or later, and not always works :( ).

Currently you can't add subtitles when creating DIVX files, so this block will be unavailable in that mode. But if you put the subtitles in the same directory than your DIVX file, usually the player should show them. Read the FAQ for details.

There's a Preview button that converts some seconds (you can choose how many), allowing you to check the audio/video quality and the audio sync. It will create the temporary file by default at /var/tmp, but you can choose other place if you preffer.

Finally there's an expansor named Advanced options. If you expand it, you will see that there are four tabs with new options, not needed normally but which can give much more control to advanced users:

In the General tab you can manually adjust the audio and video bitrate, if you are unhappy with the values assigned by the Adjust disk usage button. You can choose if you want to split each file in several chapters and its lenght too. This allows to jump forward in the movie and select scenes.

In the Video (1) tab you can choose the final resolution for this video and the aspect ratio (this is, if you want a classic, or a widescreen video). A bigger resolution will give you sharper pictures, but will need more bitrate to avoid the horrible MPEG artifacs. If you choose Default, DeVeDe will choose automagically the best resolution, based in the original video resolution and the disk format you wanted. For Video DVD, DeVeDe will use resolutions of 352x288 for PAL/SECAM, or 352x240 for NTSC, if the video's resolution is smaller or equal than that. If not, it will jump to 352x480 (NTSC) or 352x576 (PAL) if this way the video fits. If not, it will use 720x576 for PAL/SECAM or 720x480 for NTSC. For VCD, SuperVCD or CVD, DeVeDe will use, as default, the standard resolution of each format. Remember that you should click again the Adjust disk usage button after changing the final resolution, adding or removing subtitles or, in general, after doing any modification in these parameters, in order to assign a good video bit rate to each film.

Have in mind that the DVD standard only allows to create a 16:9 DVD with a width of 720 pixels, so if you activate this option, DeVeDe will ensure that the final width will be 720. For the same reason, if you choose a different width, the 16:9 option will be deactivated. This is not true for DivX files.

You can create 16:9 DVDs and DivX, but not 16:9 VCDs, SVCDs or CVDs because the formats don't allow it.

If you are creating a DivX file, you will be able to choose High Definition resolutions too (1920x1080 and 1280x720) as you can see in the above picture, but you must do it manually.

In the Video (2) tab you have:

In the Quality options tab you have:

In the Audio options tab you will find:

Audio delay: it's used to adjust the audio/video sync, allowing to fix videos with audio out of sync. You can set positive or negative values.

Create DVD with 5.1 channel sound: checking this will send to MENCODER the parameter -channels 6, so, if the source file has 5.1 sound, it will be preserved. But depending on the Mencoder version, is possible that the audio channels will be misordered.

This file already has AC3 sound: checking this will copy the audio tracks instead of recompressing them. This way, if the source file has a 5.1 sound track, it will be copied "as is", maintaining all the quality and the channel order (of course, if the original movie has 5.1 sound, the converted movie will have it too). If your file has AC3 sound is better to use this option instead of Create DVD with 5.1 channel sound.

In the Misc tab you have:

Creating the disk

After adding all the files you want and clicking in the Forward button, you will be prompted for a directory where DeVeDe will create all the files, and a generic name for them. The directory must have enought free space to hold all the temporary files (aprox. the double of the final CD/DVD size if you delete temporary files, or the triple if you don't). The generic name will be used to name all the temporary files, so the MPEG files will be named as GENERICNAME_XX_YY.MPG, the DVD tree directory will be named GENERICNAME, the ISO image will be named GENERICNAME.ISO, and the BIN/CUE files will be GENERICNAME.BIN and GENERICNAME.CUE.

Finally, the program will start to create the files. Remember that this is a very slow process, and can need more than two hours to be completed, depending on the files.

Storing and restoring the disc structure

The options Load, Save and Save as in the File menu allow you to save the current disk structure, in the case that you want continue your work later, or reuse it for another, slightly different, disk. DeVeDe stores the disk format adding the extension .devede.

When you load a disk structure, DeVeDe checks that every file is still in its place. If there is a missing, it will show an error message listing all the missing files (the complete path) and will refuse to load the structure, to avoid incorrect results. There's a trick to still load it: just copy another movie to the right directory and rename it with the right name, and after loading the structure, remove it from DeVeDe.

If the missing file is the menu background, DeVeDe will load the structure anyway, but showing a warning message and using the default background instead.

Installing DeVeDe in your Home

DeVeDe 1.1 and later can be installed in other directories, like your own home directory. This allows to use DeVeDe in machines where you don't have root access. To do so, just copy the files:

into a folder, and run devede.py from that directory ("barras.png" and "estira.png" are in the "pixmaps" directory).

History of versions

Version 3.8c

Version 3.8b

Version 3.8

Version 3.7

Version 3.6

Version 3.5

Version 3.4

Version 3.3

Version 3.2

Version 3.1b

Version 3.1

Version 3.01

Version 3.0

Version 2.13d

Version 2.13c

Version 2.13b

Version 2.13

Version 2.12

Version 2.11

Version 2.10

Version 2.9

Version 2.8

Version 2.7

Version 2.6

Version 2.5

Version 2.4A

Version 2.4

Version 2.3

Version 2.2

Version 2.1

Version 2.0

Version 1.6

Version 1.5

Version 1.4

Version 1.3

Version 1.2

Version 1.1

Version 1.02b

Version 1.02

Version 1.01

Version 1.0

Contacting the authors

This program has been created by Sergio Costas (Raster Software Vigo).
http://www.rastersoft.com
e-mail: raster@rastersoft.com

Windows port done by Peter Gill.
e-mail: peter.m.gill@gmail.com