DeVeDe - An Excellent DVD/SVCD/Divx Video Disk Creator for GNU/Linux!

Well, VCD had their days. Now it's the era of DVDs, Blue-ray disks and also the extremely popular low bitrate optimised Xvid and Divx codecs/players as well :D. Not as a user who enjoys watching them, but as a video disk author, as always with GNU/Linux, it's still a bit hard to find applications that lets you easily create DVD or VDC, etc videos.

But if you search in the proper place there's always "that" which fits :D. In that instance, there is an excellent utility called DeVeDe which is basically a GUI written in GTK+ toolkit that uses several other "engines" such as MPLayer, Mencoder (the encoder portion of MPLayer), DVD Author and several other applications.

So basically the developer of DeVeDe has done an excellent job of bringing together very useful applications and creating something "whole", that without a doubt be much appreciate by all the nerdy video author s ;-).

Main features...

*. Has a built in start-up menu, so you can easily choose the disk type that you want to create. 

*. Create a DVD/VCD/SVCD/Divx-MPEG4 disks out of any multimedia file that's supported by MPLayer/Mencoder (that means a lot... avi, mpg, wmv, mkv, divx, etc).

A clean GUI...

*. Change video bitrate, audio bitrate, resize, De-interlace, add black borders (only recommended for DVD otherwise, lower bitrate optimised codecs such as Divx may hurt in quality since they occupy a reasonable amount of "bitrate"), split according to your own preferred output size, use 1 pass or 2 pass (may change depending on the format/codec) and few other video quality related settings such as resizing methods, live previews... it is very rich in features!.

Note:- when creating live previews, when asked, try to add few seconds rather than in minutes otherwise it'll take some time to generate the preview since it actually has to encode the multimedia file. 

*. Add fonts and change the font size.

*. Rotate, swap filed.

*. PAL/NTSC support.

*. I forgot to mention the most important one... creating menus! - Change font size and colours, background change, add shadow, various alignments (center, left, top, etc) and create menu Title separately, again including live previews.

*. Adjust disk size by using built in standard sizes such as 4.7GB/8.5GB DVD, 185/650/700MB CDs and 1.4GB mini DVD, etc.

*. Volume gain.

*. Save you settings as a single project file.

*. Use multi-threading (for speedup the painstaking encoding ;-)).

*. Create .ISO or BIN/CUE image files so you can easily burn then using any CD/DVD burner.

*. Change aspect ratio.

Seriously!, this is a one heck of an application that can be recommended even for professional to use because it's really that powerful!.

You can install DeVeDe in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by using the below command in your GNU/Linux Terminal.

sudo apt-get install devede

That should install the application and all its dependencies for you. So, if you want an easy to use DVD/SVCD/Divx... disk creating (including menus) application, then I humbly advice you to use DeVeDe. It's just bloody brilliant! :D.