General Archos AV420 AV480 AV400 Series Notes and Review

CAPABILITIES

If all your MP3 Player can do nowadays is play MP3s, it's about 4 years behind the times. Almost all modern Jukeboxes can at least record MP3s too; most have FM radio (at least as an option) and several, like the AV400 series, have Video capabilities as well as being a full MP3 jukebox.

Prior to the launch of the AV400 series the video capabilities available were manually intensive, as you would expect good gadgets to be. They required user action to work them which lead to "I've bought my new spaces ship, I'm going to pilot it" induced gadget joy.

Program your AV 400

However, just as with TVs, VCRs and the like, in order to slip into the background of everyday life the Portable Video Recorder (PVR) needed to upgrade its capabilities and live a more hands-free "fire and forget" existence. That's what you get with the AV400 series. The AV300 series was designed to go with you everywhere in your pocket, or kit bag. The AV400 range is more mature than that. It's designed to stay at home, in its docking station, until such time as you want to take it out with you. Leaving it at home like this is not wasting its capabilities, because you can give it jobs and tasks to perform while you're away. Actually, that's a bit florid - it makes it sound like you can get it to do the washing up. You cannot. You can get it to record for you though.

In simple terms this little device is one of the natural successors to the VCR. You can program it to record your favourite TV programs. Unlike the AV300 series, you do not have to physically be there to press record when the program starts, you can program it in advance. Up to A MONTH before the program airs.

If you are a member of Yahoo and have My Calendar, you can import the TV schedule into my calender and then export the TV programs you want to record to the AV 400. The Archos PVR then records the program when it comes on. One month in advance is not too shabby at all, really.

Portable PVR features

When you go out and take your AV400 with you it's a different story. The mature, stay at home persona is dropped in favour of a seriously cool gadget. To recap the capabilities that you must be aware of by now, the jukebox can do this:

• Play MP3s or WMAs - either through headphones/ tiny built-in mono speaker, or via a massive PA system (cables included)
• Record MP3s - music from live sources; blah blah blah, voice, of course
• If you have the correct accessories you can also
• Make your own videos using the high spec camera attachment [link]. Home movies; Animations; Pornos - its your camcorder, do with it as you will.
• Record from TV (inc. cable), home movies, videos, etc.
• Listen to FM radio

All very good so far. Any AV400 limitations?

It cannot do this:

Record comercial DVDs. This jukebox comes with DMR - in simple terms anti-piracy controls - built-in. You have the legal right to make copies of your own DVDs for your own use - e.g. if you go traveling and want to bring a copy of your favourite DVD with you on your PVP (personal video player) you have the right to do so, but if you have an AV400 you have to 'work around' the anti-piracy controls to excercise that right. If you want to use a video jukebox to copy your DVDs, use the AV 300 range [link av300gen]. We haven't had any problems with them so far.

Another contrast to the AV300 and AV100 ranges is that the AV400 is designed to record at home, through the docking station. Recording video whilst in the field without the docking station is a non starter, and lugging the docking station from place to place sort of defeats the purpose, but if that doesn't bother you then go ahead.

User interface

The GUI (graphic user interface - what you see on the screen)

Archos claim that the interface (AVOS - audio video operating system, or archos video operating system, depending on who you listened to last) - is the most advanced for portable video devices. Its true to say that the thumbnail views of pictures and videos does make it easy to find the one you're after, and in terms of ease of use you shouldn't have any problems. The screen background; colours of the font background and the menu bars. Basically you can personalise your the interface in the same way that you can personalise your Computer's Desktop. (Or if you are a simple - in the sense of plain - windows user, you can personalise the settings the same way that you can personalise windows.)

It's simple and logical to follow as well as being pretty to look at. You can't really ask more from an operating system user interface. It's light-years ahead of the text-only displays. Joy.

As is now standard creating music folders, creating playlists, renaming tunes, etc can all be done away from a computer directly on to the AV400 itself. Also standard; present and correct is the automagic of ID3 tag downloads. The music names itself and the album and the year and the artist, etc.. You don't have to type all that stuff out.

As usual with Archos there are some nice touches to the overall package. The ability to edit your video once you have made it: e.g. cut and splice, crop for size, remove commercials, that kind of thing. None of the higher end editing facilities are present (cannot add titles, add a soundtrack, etc.) so you won't be churning out Appocolypse Now any time soon.

Bookmarking - woohoo! in a video you now have the capability to set a bookmark so that you can skip to that part of the film without watching the entire film in FF mode before you find that the clip you're looking for was on a different film. Bookmark your favourite scenes so that you can find them in no time at all. If you had a legally copied DVD of a 6-episode TV series you could use the bookmarks to act as the start of each episode instead of recording each episode as a seperate file.

Cables and connections.

There are several seperate connections that have to be made to set the unit up. Once you are done the wisdom of haviong a docking station becomes apparent. The AV400 has more cabling than previous AV incarnations from Archos, but once things are set-up on the docking station you can leave them as they are.

Unit control

The directional buttons on the front of the player are pretty self explanitory. The big one without anything written on it is the 'go' button that covers any 'go' action: select; power-on, or play, depending on the circumstances and its very easy to use. The button marked TV/LCD was originally to allow switching between the built-in LCD screen and an extrernal display source, but it is deactivated. Archos say that it may be swithced on with future firmware upgrades.

Photo options:

Typical of the Archos AV ranges the AV400 is accomplished at storing and managing photo collections. You fit a stupidly large amount of pictures on them. Safe to say that you have no hope of filling an AV400 to capcaity without cheating.

Slideshows: now you can enlighten/bore entire rooms full of people with your high quality digtal photo slide shows. In fact you can set the slide show off & running and leave the room yourself. How cool is that? Fire and forget, just like we said.

As indicated above the AV400 differs from the gmini 200 in that the display screen is full colour. That goes for photo as well as video.

Photo transfer comes from computer to AV400 via a USB2.0 cable, or if you are out in the field you can transfer digital photos from CompactFlash cards to the AV400 directly, or if you use SD, MMC, SmartMedia, MemoryStick/ Pro you can use an adapter to get the pictures from your card onto your AV400.

Extras

Another really nice photo feature is the close up/ pan option. You can look at a digital picture and magnify it, up to approx. 3X. Just like the cops you can now solve crime by reading the date on a newspaper or checking the time on a wrist watch in a photo. Something that is not much use for crime solving is rotation of the image, which you can also do.

Resume function is one of those life-saver functions .. in that it helps prevent heart attacks and technostress induced strokes. If you stop playing your music, or particualrly a video, the resume function enables you to pick up from where you left off.

You can also download album covers and sync them up with your albums so that you get a visual display along with the music (albeit static).

Battery news:

The batteries are included, of course and ... wait for it ... replaceable. Woohoo! Given that entire Jukeboxes had to be replaced in the past when the internal battery broke-down its hard to see the wisdom of making a jukebox any other way, but plenty of the more popular models still come with the battery locked into the innards. For a simple example of what can go wrong look no further than the iPod. Having replaceable batteries also means that you can buy spares to carry with you to extend the life of the Jukebox.

1 battery gives these approximate life rates: 4 hrous plus playing video (which is of course power intensive) or 12 hours plus playing music. These are constant playback rates. You get more if you play for 1 hour, stop for 23 hours, play for 1 hour .. etc.

As for other Video jukeboxes we recomend that where possible you use mains power when using the jukebox as a PVR or PVP to prevent you losing track of how much battery life you have used.