the zune is a rebranded toshiba gigabeat with a mod or two if i remeber correcttly. also i belive its bassed off the freescale refrence design
h263 is a tricy standard, i know how to encode a h263 file the ipod dosent have enough grunt to play back. also dont forget that its a "hardware assisted" chipset and so has somthing like a vfp dedecattied to just crunching h263 data
diffrence is microsoft does it all in software (well partially the iMX3 does have hardware h263 decoding abilities, apparentlly you can serioslly clock down the core and mem speed if you use it, as long as you trust freescale whitepapers)
