Anyone know of any free software prgrams out there, that I can take a DVD movie and transfer it to a format that I can play on my zune..

http://www.doom9.org/
depends on what you think free is.

http://google.com

Free is not having to buy the product :P, I downloaded abunch today but most of them only allowed you to record a movie but they had their trademark right in the middle and to get it to go away you had to buy the product, I must be a lucky guy cause I download AV something or other and it only allowed you to record the first 5 minutes they asked for your registration code so I put in I think 7-8 0's and it activated it. we will see how long this last I have done 2 movies so far without any problems and thx for the advice

If your looking for a one button click method I recommend buying a program that has everything bundled. I guess you could also demo something that can do it and rip it off. DVDflab platinum has good dvd cracking with the basics. Keep in mind the zune is 320x240. Find a good video bitrate that your comfortable with think it would be over kill to go higher then 600 for 320x240 but stay higher then 300. Progressive 24fps (23.976) is good enough, lol. Use something basic xvid,WMV / mp3,ac3,aac whatever the zune can handle to keep file size usable for it. http://www.videohelp.com/ find a newbie guide.

I <3 H.264

Does the Zune play .mkv's? I doubt it, the 360 doesn't... How nice would it be to be able to play x264 in .mkv?!

DVD Shrink is also a decent program to look into.

It's been out of circulation for some time, but is
still available if you look