Sync your Zune with Windows Media Center

When I first heard that Microsoft was going to launch its own media player last year, I just kind of assumed it would work seamlessly with other Microsoft products, like I don't know, Windows Media Center.

But it turns out that if you wanted to watch recordings you'd made on your computer on your Zune, you had to jump through a few hoops to convert your recordings to WMV and export them to your Zune. Now that Microsoft has announced the specs for the next generation of Zunes, it looks like the company has finally added support for synchronizing the little guys with Windows Media Center.

This makes the Zune into a pretty useful portable media player for MCE users. Rather than spending time converting each video you want to watch, you can just automatically keep the last few day's worth of recorded programs synchronized with your device so that when you get stuck on the train you'll have plenty to watch. Of course, if you're stuck for more than 5 hours you're out of luck, because while you can get 20 hours of audio playback on a Zune, the battery tops out at about 5 hours of video playback.