re: Best video format for tv shows on the Zune HD?

Any idea what the ideal video format is for tv shows on the Zune?  WMV?  Don't want it to take up a lot of space.

There is no "ideal" format; either format is similarly capable.  It's up to you to determine your compromise level.  Most tools allow you to adjust bitrate/quality at encode.

Of course, if you download content from Marketplace... you don't have any real decision to make.  SD or HD, and you always get a device resolution file as well.

MP4 is widely used and can be easier to deal with encoding to.  There's a new nVidia encoder I haven't tried which will apparently do WMV encoding really fast and it's supposed to be easy enough to use.

Lauren

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My Zune 30 is not only still having a good run, but it's now grown up into a Zune 60 running for twice as long of a run..

 daelin73 wrote:

MP4 is widely used and can be easier to deal with encoding to.  There's a new nVidia encoder I haven't tried which will apparently do WMV encoding really fast and it's supposed to be easy enough to use.

Lauren

What is this nvidia encoder?

Someone was mentioning it in another thread.  If you Google, "nvidia cuda", you should get a hit on their encoding software that uses the nVidia GPU to encode your video.  Someone said that they encoded HD WMV at 3000kbps in 15 minutes for a 2 hour video.  That's impressive for HD let alone SD content.

Lauren 

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My Zune 30 is not only still having a good run, but it's now grown up into a Zune 60 running for twice as long of a run..

i have been experimenting alot about what can be loaded onto the software. its hard to do actually.

i tried h.264 and i was only able to make videos less than an hour work, and i got WMV to work no matter how long.

my problem was that converting MKV and AVI to WMV on my Phenom 9950BE took 3 times as long as converting to h.264 although the file size was nearly the same. that really ticked me off. i have no idea weather a a tv show would be short enough to work with h.264 and it probobly was my encoder and not the zune software but this is really bad for anyone who is lawfully trans-coding HD video such as foreign unlicensed shows and other HD media under open licenses and media owned and not under license.

i am sure some codex issues will be fixed but i don't believe we will see the codex list to expand, only a wider tolerance of the already used codex's

this is due to pressure from the record labels and production studios. they most likly would not allow the sale of there movies on the software if other codex's where allowed, and if the tolerances where not limited.

so far WMV is the only sure bet to having your video work, and if you can wait 3hrs to get your video trans-coded (night before a flight) then by all means do it. but if you have the same problem as i do with h.264 brake the movie into sections just long enough to play, it will take just under the videos run time to trans-code and watching the video in segments is not to much of an inconvenience.