Zune I went to Chicago this last weekend and that required a flight on an air plane. I never fly without my Zune, NEVER. The older lady (70's) next to me saw my Zune and said, "What is that for?" My reply, "It has music, pictures and movies." "Movies?!", she said. "Oh, yeah", I reply. Oh yeah, movies. 

For all those that are googling this how to: Key words: How to Rip DVD's or movies for a Zune into an MP4 or mpeg-4 format for FREE. =)

I used to only listen to music and look at pictures that I have loaded. Some time in the past two weeks I decided I wanted to load movies. I know Zune supports MP4 and I knew of a few DVD rippers that I could try. After much research and many attempts here is how you rip a dvd into an mp4 format for your Zune. And as you would expect, someone else has already posted step by step directions on how to do this. For some reason it took me a while to find this post:

Anders.com : Converting DVD movies for the Zune using Windows

This post includes links to the FREE software you will need to rip a DVD movie onto your Zune. The directions are clear and come with screen shots although the screen shots may be a bit different than the ones shown, you'll be able to figure it out easily. I think the most important part is making sure that the ripping of the DVD goes into a SINGLE file i.e. "NO FILE SPLITTING". If you miss that step, than the conversion to an .mp4 (mpeg-4) format will not work.

The first movie I converted using the above software and directions was "300" and you get to choose the quality of the conversion. I did a conversion to "MPEG4 QVGA 1024kpbs Stereo/128kpbs." Which I didn't really know what all that meant except it is the high quality video and sound. Well, it turns out it is wide screen and the audio is excellent! There was only a couple of darker scenes where the Zune couldn't handle the levels of black. The fights scenes, the audio, were just awesome. I was really impressed.

I also ripped and converted a second movie "Snatch" of which I have not watched yet. I chose a lower quality conversion, "MPEG4 QVGA 768kpbs Stereo/128kpbs", basically 768 to 1024. When I watch it, I'll let you know how the quality is.

Some other details too: "300" is 5.5 GB raw and after converstion to 1024 kbps mpeg4, it is 833 MB. "Snatch" is 3.4 GB raw and after conversion to 768kbps mpeg4, it is 554 MB.

All in all, I love that I can rip movies to my Zune. I have gen 1 30 GB Zune and because I like it so much, I want the Gen 2 80 GB Zune. I hope this helps and happy ripping!