Microlau's Blog

Encoding content for Zune player

Recently, I managed to get my hands on a black 80GB Zune player (Thanks to Chewy) and I was trying to pump all my webcasts over to the small screen so that I can watch webcasts (and podcasts) on the move... I was rather disappointed that the Zune software doesn't handle this (I'm a video dummy) by itself and I still have to rely on encoders. I picked on the free tool, Windows Media Encoder 9, and here's the settings to get your video files into Zune nicely (Extracted from http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/usersguide/podcasts/create.htm)

Using Windows Media Encoder to Encode Video Content
You can use Windows Media Encoder 9 Series to encode video to a WMV file that is suitable for the Zune device. To download the free encoder, go to the Microsoft Download Center.

The following instructions describe how to use Windows Media Encoder to encode content up to the maximum quality for the Zune device. Content can be from either a live source (for example, a video camera) or an existing video file.

To encode content for the Zune device using Windows Media Encoder

1. Click the Start menu, and select Windows Media > Windows Media Encoder .
2. In the New Session dialog box, click the Wizard tab, and then double-click Custom Session .
3. In Windows Media Encoder, on the Sources tab, under Source from, do one of the following:
   • Select Devices if your content is on a device such as a video camera or a capture card.
   • Select File if content is in digital format accessible from your compute, and then locate the file you want to convert.
     
     IMPORTANT: If your file requires conversion to a format compatible with Zune, do not select Script: In File. For a list of compatible video formats, see Zune Formats and Codecs.
4. On the Output tab, check the Archive to file checkbox, and then choose a location and file name.
5. On the Compression tab, select the following encoding settings:
   
   
   

   Setting	Value
   Destination	File download (computer playback)
   Video	DVD quality video (1 Mbps VBR) By choosing VBR, the encoder will perform two-pass encoding, which maximizes the overall quality of the video although it takes roughly double the time to encode. To perform one-pass encoding, choose DVD quality video (1 Mbps CBR)
   Audio	CD quality audio (VBR)

   
   
   
6. Click Edit.
7. In the Custom Encoding Settings dialog box, click 1073 Kbps, and select the following encoding settings:
   
   
   

   Setting	Value
   Audio Format	128 Kbps, 44.1 kHz, stereo CBR
   Video Size	320x240
   Video bit rate	500K

   
   
8. Click OK to close the Custom Encoding Settings dialog box.
   
9. Click Apply.
   
   Note
   You can choose to configure additional parameters on the remaining tabs as well.
   
10. On the toolbar menu, click Start Encoding.

There's a interesting tweat by another Zune-ster (http://blogs.msdn.com/ben/archive/2006/11/29/video-encoding-for-the-zune.aspx), but I've yet to test it out. For now, I'm still relying on the nice ui before I write a program to automatically encode files for my Zune player.