Mar 1st, 11:23 pm

By:
Mike

How To: Extending Zune Battery Life

A new site which I came across a few days called ZuneMods.com has done a really nice list of tips Zune users on how they take their Zune battery life that extra mile.

Tip 1:

Complete Power Down
When many people are done listening to their Zune they hold the play button thinking they are turning their device off. WRONG, holding play puts your device into a suspended sleep mode. This sleep mode is good for people who use their Zune off and on a lot throughout the day, but if you are going to shut off your Zune and keep it off for longer than 10-15 minutes a complete power off is a good idea.

Turn Off Your Zune
To turn off your Zune, you hold ‘down‘ and ‘back‘ simultaneously for about 5 seconds. This will completely turn off your Zune. The only downside to turning it completely off is that when you choose to turn it back on (hold ‘play‘) it has to boot up, which takes 5-10 seconds.

Tip 2:

Backlight Timer
Changing the backlight timer is an easy way to improve your battery life. The Zune backlight timer works by automatically turning off your Zune screen backlight after a period of inactivity (not touching and buttons). In most cases the average user would find 15 or 30 seconds plenty of time for the backlight timer.

How to Change It
Start at the main menu, going down to ‘settings‘, then navigate down to ‘display‘ and hightlight ‘backlight‘ and click the select button. The choices are: ‘1 second‘, ‘5 seconds‘, ‘15 seconds‘, ‘30 seconds‘, and ‘1 minute‘. For optimal battery life use the lower settings. (below 30 seconds)

Tip 3:

Turn down the lights!
This one goes along with Tip 2. The brightness of your Zunes backlight can also be adjusted. By default it is set to medium, which for most people may be a good option, but for best battery life set it to low.

Set your Backlight Brightness
Start at the main menu, going down to ‘settings‘, then navigate down to ‘display‘ and hightlight ‘brightness‘ and click. There are 3 settngs: ‘Low‘, ‘Medium‘, and ‘High‘. For optimal battery life use the ‘Low‘ setting.

Tip 4:

The Wireless Transmitter
Everyone loves the WiFi features of the Zune. Sharing songs, sending pictures, and see what others are listening to. It’s a first in the mobile music player business. But the WiFi transmitter also eats up battery life, and if you can keep it off during normal use, and only turn it on when you are going to make a transfer it will increase your battery life.

Toggle Your WiFi On/Off
Start at the main menu, go down to ‘settings‘, and with ‘wireless‘ selected click the select button. There are 2 options: ‘On‘ and ‘Off‘

Tip 5:
The Built-in EQ
Many people don’t know this, but using the built-in equalizer actually lowers battery life. This is because your Zune must run all of your music through the equalizer before sending it out to your headphones. But, you will notice little to no difference between EQ settings, and furthermore when set to “None” it will play your song the way it was meant to be heard. Sounds good right.

Turning Off the EQ
Start at the main menu, and head down to “settings“. From there navigate down one to “music“. From this menu go all the way down to “equalizer“. Click the “equalizer” setting until it displays “none“.

Tip 6:

Movies in Moderation
It’s common sense, I know, but it still has to be said. Watching videos on your Zune is the fastest way to drain your battery. Music Videos, Movies, Podcasts etc.. Watching them significantly reduces battery life. The Zune has an estimated 3.5 hours or battery life while watching video. Thats much less than the 12 hours of music it delivers.

Tip 7:

Dont Run it on Empty
One last way to ensure your Zune battery retains its full charge for as long as possible is not to let the battery fully deplete. Each time you run your Zune battery to empty the Lithium Ion battery loses a bit of its potential charge. So the more you run your device to empty, the less charge your Zune will hold.

Full credit to the ZuneMods.com team, they did a great job, and hopfully will help allot of peoples Zune last a little longer on those long trips.

Dec 10th, 2:38 am

By:
Mike

TiVo to Zune Guide

A few people have been asking how to get their favorite TV shows from their TiVo to their Microsoft Zune. For those people that have not been able to work it out, here are the few easy steps that will help you out.

First thing to do is download and install the TiVo Desktop software (install guide here)Once all set up and installed, the software makes it simple to transfer your recorded TV shows from your TiVo box to the home PC, granted its connected to the home network.

Now thats set up, us the TiVo Desktop program to grab the recorded shows you want and get them onto your PC. Its now time to encode the video files into a format the Zune will read, to do this we will use a video converter. There are plenty of free ones out there, but by far the best one I have found is TMPGEnc 4.0
However, this encoder is going to set you back some cash, but it does offer you a free trial so you will know exactly what the program is like before forking over the money. There is also a great guide to using this program forund here

I hope this helps, and if any one out there has a better method or knows another good program to use, let us know.

Update: 

Thanks to stepleon how has posted another option for this:

You can also use the Tivo Desktop “Plus� version which is the same used for the iPod and PSP. If I recall correctly the setting I used was MPEG 4 but I am guessing the one marked for iPod use will likely work as well.

This will also cost you some money to purchase the key from Tivo to upgrade to the plus version but this solution only requires the installation of the one product. This was important for us since it was installed on my wife’s work laptop since the Zune software is not compatible yet with Vista.

Thanks Stepleon!