It's after Thanksgiving now, and the Christmas season is upon us.  But, rather than write a lengthy entry on my Christmas plans and how difficult Christmas shopping is when you're halfway across the world from everyone, I noticed that is has been a long time since I've written a good nerdy entry.  Today offered a nice opportunity to do so because I just tested out a cool new piece of software, so I thought I'd tell you about it.

It can be difficult for Linux users to make Mac and Windows users jealous.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I obviously believe in the Linux operating system (it's my OS of choice, and I think it is in many ways superior to the alternatives).  At the same time, though, I'm not a blind fanboy.  I realize that for the average user, many tasks can seem more complex and difficult using Linux than Windows or Mac OS.  Now, Linux has made some remarkable strides over the past 3 years or so, and it has caught up and even surpassed Windows and Mac OS in several respects.  For example, in the areas of general security (which has always been a Linux strongpoint), ease of program installation (if the program is available in an online repository, at least), networking, and user management, I feel Linux has an edge on any other available operating system.

It's been a different story on the multimedia front, however.  For the most part, working with media has been a big hassle--and much too much of a hassle for your average user.  This, too, is changing.  With the advent of several new programs (Banshee, Muine, and Rhythmbox for audio/ipod support; F-Spot and DigiKam for photos; Totem GStreamer, MPlayer, and Xine for video) Linux is starting to make a comeback.  Truthfully, I feel in the area of audio, Linux has caught up at last.  Banshee is a fantastic and fully featured audio player that rivals and even surpasses iTunes in many ways.  Rhythmbox is not far behind, and for KDE users (I, personally, use Gnome) Amarok is really unbeatable.  Video has always been the problem, though--at least for me.

Now, Linux is getting better at playing video.  With the proper GStreamer plugins installed (namely, ffmpeg) I've found that I can play most of the videos I care about (that would be mostly mpeg and divx format).  Of course, there is still the problem of proprietary formats such as WMV and MOV.  It's hard to do much about these without stepping on a whole lot of licensing restrictions, however.  I have my own opinions on what should be done, but that will be another rant...er...I mean, blog entry.

The main topic of this blog, however, is a new program I just tried out called  DeVeDe.  This is a great little program that can take any video format that is playable by MPlayer (which is just about anything) and encode it to be played on a DVD player.  Quite frankly, this is a program that has been missing from Linux for a long time.  Before I found DeVeDe, making a video playable on DVD was a serious pain, and pretty much impossible for someone without a good working knowledge of video codecs, compression ratios, and proper formatting of a video DVD.

DeVeDe changes all that hassle.  It's probably the easiest DVD authoring program I've ever used...including programs for Mac OS and Windows.  You simply select the file you wish to convert, tell DeVeDe what type of disk you are making (DVD, Video CD, Super VCD, etc...), and then in about an hour it will output a disc image ready to be burned with your burning software of choice.  Really, this is the only feature that I felt was missing from DeVeDe--the ability to burn the video directly from the program.  However, I can't complain too much.  It's not too much of a hassle to simply ask Nautilus of Gnomebaker to burn the image for me, but I could see a less experienced user wondering what to do with this ".bin" and ".cue" file, and thinking the program had spent 1 hour doing absolutely nothing.

The greatest strength of DeVeDe, in my opinion, is in the extremely intelligent layout of the GUI interface.  As a Gnome user, I generally feel like the simpler, the better.  KDE and Windows always felt cluttered to me for this reason.  However, recently Gnome has taken what I consider to be a wrong turn.  They've simply removed options and settings they felt were confusing or rarely used.  As a Linux power-user, I want the options available.  I just want them neatly tucked away in the appropriate cupboard until I want them.  This is what DeVeDe's GUI achieves.  All the absolutely necessary settings are available from the start.  Then, if you want to get a little more fancy (such as changing the bitrate to something non-standard), you will find it is available, but neatly tucked away so as to not scare someone who is not familiar with these types of settings.  In this way, it is completely accessible to a general user who simply wants to make his home video work in his DVD player, and also a more experienced user who wants to adjust settings to optimize quality and file-size.  Simply fantastic.

The first video I chose to convert was Miracle on 34th Street.  It's one of my favorite holiday movies, and after Thanksgiving, I felt like it was appropriate.  Now, finding DVDs to be more expensive than CDs, I chose to give the SVCD format a try.  It has higher resolution than a VCD, but it is still burned onto a CD rather than a DVD.  After adjusting the audio quality and video bitrate to make sure the movie would fit on just one CD, I was off and running.  The encoding took about 1 hour and 15 minutes (a little less than 1:1), and it was another 3 minutes to burn the CD.  After that, I put the disk in my DVD player, and it played like a charm.  Simply wonderful.

As I said before, it's rare that a Linux user can say something to make a Windows of Mac OS user truly jealous.  I think the ease of use that DeVeDe provides might just do it, though.  :)

Thanks for putting up with a little geekiness.  Hopefully it will be out of my system for a while now. ;)