I'm very new to video transcoding and my mind is overloaded with information (most of which I do not understand). I have a Zune 80 (I bought it just before the 120 was released and am very upset about that!) and I want to watch my DVD movies and tv episodes on it. I discovered that DVD movies had an aspect ratio of 1.85, so I'd need to crop a lot of the movie off or watch it with big black bars. I decided that this wouldn't work very well.

So, I'm left with tv on DVD. I have most seasons of 24 which are in 4:3 AR (I think) so this should fit better on the Zune. So, how do I do this?

I know DVD Shrink will rip a DVD to my hard drive. If I allot enough space, it will rip in uncompressed which I've tried with a few movies. Now, I'm not sure where to go from here. I've read that apps like Super, VirtualDub, WinFF, MediaCoder, etc can convert to a Zune-compatible format - is this right? What if I want to make it a WMV? Can I use WME9 somehow? I read something about using VirtualDub as a frameserver to WME9?

One last unrelated thing which I thought I'd ask here - does anyone know of a good place to buy music (CD or digital)?

Thanks for helping this newbie people!