CUCUSOFT has released the Zune Video Converter Suite. I purchased this last week prior to heading out to Vegas for the WebBuilder 2.0 confernence.  As you might imagine, this is a much nicer experience in comparison to the pseudo-hack methods I posted earlier.   While I’ve not used it for DVD video yet, I did use it to convert some of my MediaCenter recordings (about 10 episodes of one of my favorite TV shows) and it did a great job.

The night before my trip, I queued up 10 episodes of one of my favorite TV shows  (that had been recorded with MediaCenter).  I’m happy to report the result were files that were resized to the size of the Zune and were a little over 200 megs each.  I watched 3 episodes on the Zune (each over an hour) on my way to Vegas, and can report quality was quite satisfactory.

On the DVD side, I’m very interestied in testing it out when I get back. I’ve used PocketDVD Wizard in the past (for smartphone and pocketpc), but the conversion time was an absolute nightmare (very long). CUCUSOFT claims to be faster than most packages, as it does the conversion in a single pass (vs. 2 pass conversions in other software packages).

I would imagine this functionality would come to the Zune at some point (wishful thinking, anyway), but if you’re looking for a quick fix, I’d personally recommend it.

NOTE:  I ran this on my MediaCenter PC at home which is not migrated over to Windows Vista yet – if you’re looking to run this on Vista, I’d double-check with the folks at CUCUSOFT to confirm that it’s compatible.

http://www.cucusoft.com/dvd-to-zune+zune-video-converter-Suite.asp