Creating playable DVDs using DeVeDe

Heh, I just blog how to rip movies from your DVD a few months ago and now I'm blogging how to turn video clips (ie. avi, mpeg, wmv) into a DVD that you could just pop in to your DVD player. Double heh heh! :-)

I've been getting a number of 'request' from friends and relatives to burn their video clips from their camera into something viewable in their DVD player. Also, my sis has been bugging me about it. She has this collection of mpeg files she took from a recital from one of her in-law's daughter and she wants to show it during a family get-together.

So a quick google for an open-source DVD authoring tool turn out the DeVeDe program that can get the job done. Better yet, it's already in the RPM Fusion repo, so installing it and getting it to run is dead easy. Kudos to the developer, it's great tool.

Anyways, someone might find this info useful, who knows... So I'm blogging this one for posterity.

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Step 1: Log in as root and run the following command (I'm running Fedora 11 and Internet connection is required):

# yum -y install devede

Note: All in all, it was only around 6MB file download since I'm already using most of it's dependencies (ie. mplayer, mencoder, etc).

Step 2: From the command line, run the following:

$ rpm -q devede
$ devede

The first window you should get is the following:


Click on the Video DVD and you should get the following menu:


Step 3: From here, simply click the Properties button under Titles and change the title. Note that each Title is film on it's own. And each Titles is composed of Files.

Step 4: Add the Files that will be under the Title. Simply click Files->Add and in the next dialog box, find the file you would like to add.

Step 5: (Optional) Add another Title. Note that when you insert the DVD to the DVD Player, these Titles are the different categories of your film.




Step 6: Choose the appropriate Default Format, PAL or NTSC. Now this is probably the only tricky part when trying to create a playable DVDs. I didn't have a clue what were these format were, so I stuck with default one (ie. PAL) only to find out later on that our DVD player is NTSC... oh well... you learn.

Step 7: Click Forward button. It should then prompt you to "Choose the folder where DeVeDe will create the DVD image and a name for it". Just stick the default setting, should be alright.

Step 8: Click the Advance Option below, and then choose Video Options->Scaling Mode->Add Black Bars. This option will make sure that your video is scaled appropriately (it will add black line above and below your video). And then click the OK button

Step 8: It should now start converting all your files into a single iso image.


Step 9: Make yourself a tea or go for a run or something. Depending on how fast your computer is, this might take a while. On my creaky old 2.40GHz Celeron box, it took an hour and half to encode 2.4GB of mpeg data into an iso image. It's excruciatingly slow.


Step 10: After your Devede tool is done, it will create a file with an *.iso extension in a directory you specified during the initial steps. Now all you have to do is burn this iso image into any blank DVDs. Probably the easiest way to burn it is to use K3B or Brasero utilities. Or just burn it directly using the following command:

$ growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=/path/to/file/movie.iso

Voila! Success!