I recently got myself a Zune HD.  I do like it a lot.  But now my video files just don’t have the quality to impress anyone when I want to show it off.  So I decided to re-rip some of my videos in a higher definition.  I soon remembered how much I hate video conversion.

My goal was to get the highest quality file onto the Zune HD without having the Zune software transcode it and to do it using freeware tools.  Whenever you choose to go the freeware route, you’re going to be sacrificing convenience.

The big hammer in my toolbox is the free Windows Media Encoder (WME).  This will encode to WMV, which is a format the Zune loves to eat.  So everything I’m doing is revolving around this tool.  However, now I need a bunch of additional tools to work around its shortcomings.

WME will only work with a single file at a time, so DVDs with multiple VOB files can’t be processed directly.  So, I used DVDShrink to rip the main feature from a DVD to a single VOB file (this is set in the options).  At the same time, I used DVD43 to remove the encryption.  DVD43 only works under 32-bit systems, so I run DVD43 and DVDShrink in a Windows XP virtual machine hosted with Sun VirtualBox.

So far, we have 4 programs involved.  The VOB is now ripped and put into WME.  Now is an excellent time to discover that WME doesn’t read AC3 audio from VOBs.  Now we need a program to demux the audio into its own file and let WME mux them back together.  This can be done pretty easily with BeSweet, but you also need to download the VOBInput.dll additional file.

Now 5 programs.  Now WME can read the video from the VOB, the audio from the WAV and put them together.  But on the very first DVD I tried – Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense – the encode would stop after about 40 minutes.  Looking at the details a little closer, the VOB was reported to be 40 minutes long, but the WAV was 1:28 long.  When playing the VOB, the time would reset to zero after the 40 minute mark.  This, I’ve learned, is a timecode break.  Now we need a tool to fix this.

The timecode break can be fixed using a tool called StreamClip.  And it requires that Quicktime Alternative 1.81 be installed.  These are going on the virtual machine so as not to pollute my main system.  Unfortunately, StreamClip seems to be designed for Apple users (the cancel button is on the left of the windows), so all the audio export features are incompatible with WME, so BeSweet has to be kept.

So in summary, this is what I needed to take a DVD and put it on the Zune HD, in order of execution:

1. Sun VirtualBox – Host for a 32-bit Windows install
2. DVD43 – Decrypts DVDs.  Only runs in 32-bit.  Run in virtual machine.
3. DVDShrink – Rips DVD to single VOB file for processing.  Run in virtual machine
4. Quicktime Alternative – Needed for StreamClip. Run in virtual machine
5. StreamClip – Fixes timecode breaks in VOB file (not always needed). Run in virtual machine
6. BeSweet – Extracts audio from VOB to WAV
7. Windows Media Encoder – Creates the WMV file from the VOB and WAV files.

That’s a lot of programs and a lot of work, but hey, it’s free!

Once I have a workable routine, I’ll try to post something on it.  The BeSweet and WME steps aren’t just a simple point-and-click procedure.