DeVeDe processes video files which are loaded and then creates an ISO image which can be burnt to a DVD or CD; this will work on any home DVD player. DeVeDe handles every format supported by FFmpeg (or Mencoder), because it uses them as backends to do the conversion. This includes avi, mp4, mkv and many more.
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He says that in the case of DeVeDe, "I wrote it due to my mother and a famous Spanish chef called Karlos Arguiñano: this chef had a TV program where he explained his recipes.
"He is a showman, and my mother loves him. One of my sisters and I wanted to give her a collection of DVDs with the best recipes published in the program.
"Unfortunately, the program's producer never launched a DVD recompilation; it doesn't exist, so we decided to do it ourselves. And there came the big problem: all the tools to do that with Linux were for command line, there was no GUI utility to easily author a video DVD. So I decided to write it, in order to simplify the work of creating that present."
The road Raster took to programming also sounds familiar. "I always loved electricity and electronics, and when (I was a) child I enjoyed making things with lights, motors and electromagnets," he said.
"Then, when I was 9, my grandfather bought a Sinclair Spectrum for my brother, and it was love at first sight. It was like magic when my brother typed some commands and the screen changed slowly its colour, or text moved across the old TV set.
"I took the manual and started to use it in secret, when my brother was outside, writing my first programs in BASIC. I suppose that the risk of being discovered made it even more exciting and fun. Four years later, my brother bough a Sinclair QL and I inherited the Spectrum, so I was able to use it more freely. At that point I was quite good with BASIC, so I started to learn Assembler to exploit to the limit that old microcomputer and see what was it able to do. It was pure fun."
His interest in Linux was kindled by a friend at university who gave a talk about Slackware GNU/Linux.
"It was 1994, or maybe 1995. He explained that it was free, and was being distributed that month in a magazine, so it was easy to obtain. At that time I was using OS/2, because DOS and Windows 3.11 were quite underpowered, but I decided to give it a try.
"When I started to play with it I got surprised, because Linux offered to me a powerful and stable operating system, much like OS/2, but it also had the big advantage of being free: I could modify it, adapt it to my needs. If something did not work, I could fix it... It was something really new for me, and really exciting.
"It came with free development tools, in contrast to Windows or OS/2, where you have to pay for them; for an amateur programmer, it was much like heaven. So, slowly, I started to learn how to use it and to migrate all my system, and finally, in 1999, I deleted the OS/2 partition."
