Zune Thoughts: Convert Your Videos for the Zune with Windows Media Encoder

Next, click the Compression tab. Change the Destination: field to ‘File download (computer playback), the Video: to ‘DVD quality video (1 Mbps VBR)’ and the Audio: to ‘CD quality audio (CBR)’.

Now comes the one tricky part in the whole process: determining the proper resolution for your output file. This step is unnecessary if you’re encoding a TV show or other video that’s at standard 4:3 ratio, but if you’re encoding something in widescreen format (as most movies on DVD are), you’ll need to determine what the proper video height is. We already know what the output width will be: 320 pixels to match the width of the Zune’s screen. If we were to simply encode the file at 320 x 240, we would get a .WMV file that’s ‘stretched’ vertically. So we’ll need to find out what the correct height will need to be in order to maintain the proper aspect ratio. This is actually much easier than it sounds.


Click on the Video Size tab. There, in the dark gray area on the right of the window, you’ll see the original video size listed, in this case 720 x 400. Just below that you’ll find the aspect ratio. We want the value that's listed under ‘Cropped:’, in this case 1.80:1 (in case you’re wondering, 720 divided by 400 = 1.8). Since we know the output width will be 320, just divide 320 by 1.8 and you’ll get the proper output height to maintain the correct aspect ratio, in this case 177.78. You’ll always need to round to the nearest even number, so we’ll round up to 178, giving us a final output resolution of 320 x 178.


Click back to the Compression tab. Click the ‘Edit’ button next to the Destination field. This will bring up the Custom Encoding Settings window. In this window, click on the tab labeled ‘1073 Kbps’. Change the Audio format: to ‘128 kbps, 44 kHz, stereo CBR’ and enter the output resolution determined in the last step in the Video size: fields. Go down to Video bit rate (average). You can leave this at 1000K if you like, and it will give you a great quality video, but one with a large file size. Dropping it down to 500K will give you a good compromise between file size and video quality, which is what we’ll do here. You might want to play around with this number to achieve the desired quality/file size ratio. Click OK to exit the Custom Encoding window.