River Past's Crazi Video for the Zune

[Damion Chaplin]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.riverpast.com/en/prod/crazivideo/zune/' target='_blank'>http://www.riverpast.com/en/prod/crazivideo/zune/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>&quot;Zune put all of your favorite video, music, and pictures at your fingertips wherever you are. It is Microsoft's follow-up to the PMC effort. With a large 3 inch LCD, it is better suited for video playback than iPod. However, you probably have found that Windows Media Player doesn't accept all the video in your collection. River Past Crazi Video for Zune is the easiest way to put your video on your Portable Media Center.&quot;</em></p><p>Another day, another Zune video converter.&nbsp; If you're still looking for something that will convert your videos to the Zune, Crazi Video might be what you're looking for.&nbsp; I downloaded the trial (limits you to a 2-minute encode) and found it gave me OK results.&nbsp; I did feel the picture was a little too compressed and showed a little too much artifacting.&nbsp; However, that may be something you're willing to put up with for the convenience it allows.</p>

[Ranma13]

The quality of the converted files is so horrible, this program's not worth getting. It does, however, supposedly handle MKV and OGM files, which nearly 50% of all my files are in. From my experience with several programs that convert to Zune format, this is what I've found:

Cucusoft Video to Zune Converter: Ugly interface, can only add 3 files at a time, and after it's done converting, it always asks if you want to open the output folder or add the files to your Zune software. Otherwise than that, the converted files aren't bad in quality, and uses bilinear scaling. Also, some standard AVI files that I have couldn't be converted and I don't know why, all I get is a green screen for output.

M2Convert for Zune: Very simple interface, doesn't allow you to tweak anything except 3 quality settings (low, medium, high). Converted files are scaled using nearest neighbor, leading to lots of aliased effects. I actually bought this program because I wanted something where I can queue up a bunch of files, hit convert, then wake up in the morning and have the files all ready to go, but the aliasing kills it for me since I watch a lot of anime that has big constrasts in color, which really makes the aliasing stand out.

Xilisoft Zune Video Convert 3: Simple interface, allows for tweaking of video and audio bitrate, and video is bilinear scaled. Probably the best program I've used for "add, click convert, and done" conversions, but it lacks support for OGMs and MKVs.

If I could re-invest my purchase, I'd buy Xilisoft. M2Convert isn't a bad program, but I can't stand the aliasing.

[Jason Dunn]

Thanks for the wrap-up Ranma13...I'm amazed at the number of Zune conversion software tools out there. What's even more amazing is how hard some of those companies try to spam our forums. :rolleyes: