This is off-topic, but I felt I had to share it.
A lot of people have been wondering when Microsoft will release a halfway-decent converter for the Zune that will support AVI, etc. (and that don't wind up looking terrible, as they do with the registry hack). While we aren't quite there yet, Microsoft's just-released
Expression suite of media tools contains
Expression Media Encoder as one of its core components, and I gotta say, it ain't half bad. I just happened to be messing around with the program, attempting to manually change values to match the Zune's defaults when I noticed that there's already a profile for "Hardware Device - Zune", set to convert the video into 320x240 Zune-ready format. I tested it out with an AVI rip of a DVD, and it worked quite well. On the default Video Complexity setting (3, with 2-pass conversion), the colors were noticeably duller, with especially muted oranges and reds. The blues, especially those with deep hues were not quite as vivid (this is while watching on the computer, comparing them splitscreen--a nice feature), but overall, it looked much better on the Zune's screen (and took up far less space).
Microsoft offers 180 days of free functionality on the converter via a serial key shown publically on the site. I look forward to seeing what they'll offer next.
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