Thanks to Woot I’ve upgraded from my $40 SD-based MP3 player to a refurbished brown Zune. It’s a great deal and a handy device, especially for the price ($100). I’ve easily put my entire MP3 collection on it, plus a dozen or two of my favorite CDs.

A really nice feature of the Zune software was its auto-rip mode. Setting the software to rip automatically when a CD is entered, and eject when done, made it fairly whiz-bang to copy CDs onto. Insert, close drive, wait a few minutes for drive to eject, put a new CD in and repeat. Sync when done and they’re all on the Zune.

One disappointing fact about the Zune is that despite its ability to play video, it’s really hard to find video to put on it or otherwise get videos onto it. The Zune Marketplace, M$’s answer to the iTunes Store, has no video available on it at all. Just music. The Zune website suggests you do a search for “viral video” to find the gobs of free videos out there. I don’t know when they put this together — the Zune was originally released in late 2006 — but nearly every “viral video” I know of these days is on a flash-video streaming site like Google Video or YouTube. And M$ doesn’t have a comparable video sharing site yet.

There are solutions to this, but none are easy. I’ve tried to find answers to two questions: getting Tivo movies onto Zune, and getting YouTube movies onto Zune. With only free options. There doesn’t seem to be a robust, working free solution to the first problem; the best bet is probably shelling out $25 for Tivo Desktop Plus, which converts its movies to iPod-compatible format, which is also compatible with Zune. As for the latter problem, so far the best answer has been the Videora iPod Converter, from which you can search YouTube and automatically download and convert videos. The software expects to be synching to an iPod, but close out the error popups and dig up the output folder and import it into the Zune library.

While Zune has its limitations, hopefully M$ will get wise and make the Zune more interoperable with the next upgrade. Some rumors say that the next Zune firmware update will allow the Zune’s onboard WiFi to connect directly to the Internet, which seems like a no brainer.