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Archos Widescreen PMP
An anonymous reader writes "Archos has just announced their newest portable audio/video player the AV 700 Mobile DVR. The new unit has a 480x234 pixel widecreen display, a hub to record from TV and DVD, and offers a 100GB drive. The sucker is heavy though weighing in at over a pound. Cost is $799 for the 100GB model and $599 for the 40GB. MP3 Newswire also has Part 1 of its MP3 players for summer. Most interesting are Creative's new Neeon and a high end unit from Bose."
I got 1st post! And the DVR looks great...
Why's there no HDTV support?
I want a tivo like device that I can control with WiFi from my computer (share content, setup etc).
It'll fit right under my TV where the Xbox 360 was going to go.
16x9 pixels qualifies as widescreen, my friend. :D
Tis "mobile" my friend
If people want to listen to music, the will want something smaller, if they want to watch video, they will want something bigger. I personally don't think that combining a portable audio/video player is a good idea or will sell well.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Archos Widescreen is PIMP!
twice as wide as it is tall seems like a widescreen, at the least wider than the standard 15" or 15.4" width ratios.
No highs? No lows? It must be Bose!
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
"The sucker is heavy though weighing in at over a pound."
Hit the gym, Nancy.
I don't want to spend $800 on a portable display device that doesn't render at least 480p DVD quality. The specs listed are ambiguous. It says that there's a doc station for pass through to a VCR. Does this mean that its only external output is composite? If so - yuck. I expect at least component, and preferably also DVI/HDMI. And why would I want to carry 100GB of disk space on a portable if it won't output true 480p? Never mind that disk space like that is appropriate for HD as well.
So, my opinion: nice toy; waste of money. --M
Sure it's widescreen. Contrast ratio is 2.somedecimals:1, compared to the normal 4:3. It's very small though. I'll keep to my iBook for watching pr^H^Hmovies on the go, more real estate on the screen...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Woweeee
Any plans to port rockbox to it!?
not seeing much reason to buy this over an 80GB iBook. ymmv.
For those who RTFA, man I can't wait to get all those songs off my video camera onto my Archos AV700! =P
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Contrast ratio? I wonder what I smoked. Yadayada, you get what I meant. :)
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I recently starting commuting to Manhattan, and like many straphangers*, I want to listen to anything but the preachers and beggers on the subway. I was about to buy an iPod mini, but when I saw how much the Archos Gmini 400 does, I was blown away. I'm a photographer, so I have a bunch of high capacity compact flash cards lying around that I could actually use with the Gmini, which has a CF reader.
Archos Gmini review: http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041021/
* Straphanger: slang for a subway rider. NYC subways used to have leather straps that riders could "hang" from in order to not fall when the car started moving. They've all been replaced by metal bars.
That's too big for a music player, too small for a video player.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
For those of us not from the US that con't be bothered to type 20.8oz in kg in Google.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
It took me 17 attempts before my brain managed to stop reading the title as "Widescreen PSP". :(
... you think a pound is heavy.
I like the idea of making everything portable, and also trying to fit in as many functions as possible. But as this equipment gets smaller and smaller, I'm just scared out of my f'n mind to spend $799 on something so small, that will either: a) get lost easily or, b) break while in my pockets.
BTW, whatever I do that'll make a small, portable unit break in my pocket is my business.
I wonder what I smoked...
a cock perhaps?
Maybe they're very big pixels.
Shh, don't tell my girlfriend.
The Archos PMA480 http://www.archos.com/products/overview/pma_400.ht ml?sid=j2232s23by4oy2kbocfyjy is a even better device. Plays video at 704x480, plays the same games, records from TV, has 802.11B, runs on linux, includes Opera, weighs LESS than a PSP, and costs $799. Admittedly, it has a smaller hardrive but that's easy to fix. I don't like the touchscreen keyboard but you have to give up something.
It records and plays MPEG4 and DivX, not MPEG2. You'll get more than 20 full length movies out of 100GB of storage.
To some people, a "full length movie" includes all menus (including menu games), all deleted scenes, audio tracks in all languages and commentaries, and all angles (for those educational or erotic titles that actually use multiple angles), and everything else the director filled 7.95 GiB with. Can commercial MPEG-4 implementations handle those DVD features?
I guess the only good things about devices like this is that they're smaller and come pre-configured for their task.
why would i go for something like this for $799 when I can get a brand new iBook thats much more flexible for $999? It doesn't sound as if this unit is exactly lightweight... and, at least with the iBook, I get DVD playback and a larger screen as well...
Thoughts on the 2nd linked article on MP3 players: 1. The Bose is CD based. Bose really doesn't get it. The extra time, effort, and waste of making a CD every time to change the music selection is too much of a hassle vs. flash and hdd players. 2. The Maxfield Diablo plays OGG, neat.
It's wider than standard 16:9 or 4:3
I am trolling
Bose is all about the quality of sound (as opposed to Bang and Olufsen who are all about style and exclusivity).
As soon as I read that, I knew these people know nothing but marketing hype.
actually the ratio is 16:9, the same as you get in a movie theater =P
I am Spartacus
Firefox catches popups and banners but what action can i take against /vertisements. We need some kind of Tivo solution for /.
And what you ask isn't there in the article. Missing those features wouldn't bother me as much as the poor screen and lack of component/DVI output. If I could hook it up to my projector or HDTV and get 480p out, then one could argue the value proposition - I suppose. But lacking then, then - for me - forget it. We each have a killer feature we demand, I suppose. --M
Seems like they're skimping on (320-234)*480 = 86*480 = 41280 pixels then.
Unless, accidentally, 480 / 234 ~= 2.something...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I have an iPaq that, quite literally, has over a hundred ebooks on it. And while I'd love to replace it with a device that could play movies and tv, I'm not going to dump my favorite form of recreation...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I don't know... I can't relate to Ounces (unless it's the liquid kind), and not much more to kg's... It weighs 1.3 lbs And no, I'm not american either
Don't we all enjoy video on our iPod now*?
Well. Ok. Maybe not. But just wait until tomorrow when the new shiny Intel Inside® videoPods present themselves in the hand of His Steveness.
*Don't buy or sell the so called "videoPod Shuffle" to sight-impaired people on eBay these are not endoresed by Apple.
This
oh yeah.
I've owned the JBMM20 and the AV300 - the great-grandfather and grandfather of the AV700 - and I have to say that they're amazing pieces of technology. They run embedded firmware on the DSC25 that is compatible with linux so you can run Linux on it if you really want. The video playback on the AV300 is stunning, even at 352x240 resolution: you can read subtitles clear as day. It has decent quality sound (much better if you get a nicer pair of headphones like the Seinnheiser HD280 Pro), a bright lcd screen and 3-4 hours of video playback on the "Low Brightness" option which ironically is quite bright still. Oh yeah... and it plays DiVX
For anyone that's interested, don't even think about getting the bigger harddrive model. Both old and new models use standard 3.5" laptop harddrives, which means you can buy one off of PriceWatch and slap it in there. Just format it with a FAT boot sector first and you're good to go.
Tivo needs to have a small unit like this. Or heck let Archos Tivo OS on their machine. Tivo would have to work on the aspect of making it more portable. But it would sell.
After getting bored of my same old Rio Karma. I decided to pick up the iAudio X5. This is the cream of the crop of ipod sized mp3 players. It supports Ogg Vorbis/FLAC/Mp3/WMA/Xvid Mpeg 4 video and has a rather nice 18bit color screen. Packed in with FM Radio, Voice Recording, Picture Viewing, Line Recording and BBE enhancement I had to check it out for cheaper than what the Rio Karma was selling for. I love this thing and I am sure we will see it in another part of Mp3Newswire's MP3 Players for Summer. Definitely a Geek's mp3 player by all good natures of the word. The firmware updates are fewquent and feature packed. The build quality is excellent being all aluminum brushed in black.
Just a heads up for people asking "Does it support Ogg".
I was refering to SIZE not ratio.
This neat Archos toy surely demonstrates the feasibility of HDD video recording. The price is a bit high (could as much as double the camera price), but will probably come down significantly since video cams are produced in SO larger quantities.
Size? Than you're speaking about bigscreens et al? "Widescreen" only has to do with the width/height-ratio - a widescreen is a screen that is significantly wider than it's high.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
How come 75% of the posts in here say that it's better to buy a laptop.
The Archos Pma430 is 600$, just search it on froogle.
Archos has a deal with Echostar in US to market all their Gmini400, AV400 and AV700 in special packages, maybe rebranded as PocketDish. This is interesting because Echostar will probably give away this portable video player/recorder just for getting new customers over from the DirecTV/Tivo users.
The Archos players are approximately same price as an iPod anyways, so stop saying that it's better to have a laptop, then you should say that the iPod is the same price as a laptop, and then anyways all Archos devices are much cooler than iPods.
Specially the Pma430 which is a fully hackable Linux embarqued with touch-screen, wifi, usb-host and still has all the portable video recorder/player full DivX compatibillity (dvd-resolution simple profile + b-frames + vbr-mp3)
HDTV has resolutions greater than 720 x 1080 scan lines. We're talking about some 480 x 234 on this device. This DVR doesn't comes anywhere close to HD.
Additionally, to get hi-def out you need component cables. Component cables (high-quality ones in particular) are thick and bulky to reduce interference and signal loss. One set of decent component cables would probably weigh more than this device.
Honestly, if you want a portable HD setup you might as well go out and buy a new laptop with a nice, big screen.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Excuse me? This unit gives a screen aspect ratio of 2.05:1. This is about 15% wider than widescreen TVs, which have an aspect ratio of 16:9 or roughly 1.78:1. So, it is not "somehow" widescreen -- it is widescreen. Whoever modded you as "insightful" needs to be modded "-1 clueless".
:)
Oh, great. Now this unit will give the anti-widescreen crowd a reason to bitch about why 16:9 movies have the black bars in the sides. Wonderful.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
"One significant problem that we found in our reviews of their players is that most movie files available online are in formats not readable by the Archos, requiring them to be laboriously converted before they could play on their devices."
If Archos would like to expand its marketshare (and survive the onslaught by Sony and, eventually Apple), they need to address this fundamental flaw with their PMP line of players.
Why would anyone want this new model instead of the existing Archos AV4100:t ml o mments/archos_av4100_portable_video_recorder_playe r_announced/
http://www.archos.com/products/prw_500697_specs.h
which also has 100GB, is similarly priced, also records from TV, is smaller, weighs less, and has better resolution:
"DVD playback is full DVD resolution up to 704x480; recording is standard TV resolution, up to 512x384 (SVCD)." according to:
http://www.photographyblog.com/index.php/weblog/c
The only advantage of the new 700 model seems to be that the screen is bigger, but the price is size and weight that make it significantly less appropriate to also use as an mp3 audio device.
Actually, I disagree. Many people have to deal with hour-long (or more) train rides to or from work. When I was visiting England last year, it took over an hour to get from London to Slough, which is only about 30 miles or so outside of London. I would have LOVED to watch something like "Monty Python" while in the train. That device is not small, especially when compared to things like USB MP3 players, but it's certainly small enough to fit in a briefcase or perhaps even a belt pouch of some type. During colder months, it could easily fit in a coat's inner pocket.
No matter how you look at it, it's a better alternative than lugging around a laptop if you want to watch video instead of just listen to music.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Bose makes garbage products and pawns them off on the uniformed via spending more on marketing than every other audio company in the world combined.
Most of their products won't reproduce sound above 13khz and those Tri-ports are the worst headphones you can buy, seriously, a good pair of $50-$100 Grado or Sennheiser headphones have far superior sound quality.
Exactly what I said.
MP4 is the container - MPEG4 is the video format within it.
Just because the MPEG4 standard specifies a container doesn't mean that the container and the codec are one and the same.
pixels don't matter for it to be a widescreen or not a widescreen.. Pixels can be wide pixels, so for this device to be widescreen or not is all about the size of the screen, width should be 16/9th of height, no matter pixels. The pixels here are just that resolution detail the screen can show, though any video up to DVD resolution + b-frames + vbr-mp3 work fine, and will just be processed down to the 400 something pixels, which is more than very heigh and ample enough resolution even on a 7inch screen, which probably is for a fantastic portable video experience. mp3newwire don't know 100% what they are talking about when they say Archos devices are not compatible with pirated DivX movies. I think probably 70% of DivX and XviD will work fine on Gmini400, AV400, AV700 and even more video shall work on the Pma430 once more codecs are added since the Software development kit has just been released. Only DivX with qpel and cmg won't work (anyways only idiots encode their DivX with those advanced mpeg-4 features. AC3 audio won't work (I think this could be fixed in future firmware upgrade) neigther does ogg vorbis audio work in video (might require too much processing power to hope for it in firmware upgrade). DivX 3.11 doesn't work eigther and 3-point b-frames which some people encode their XviD with won't work for now.. Basically people encode their DivX movies in hundreds of different ways, you cannot expect a portable DivX player to play all of it, not yet anyways. And I am quite sure you cannot find any other company than Archos supporting b-frames and vbr-mp3 in dvd-resolution mpeg-4 AVI.
The opening paragraph ircked me. I really don't believe that when Steve Jobs was talking about there being no content that he was talking about paid content. Most people use computers to maintain a library of their digital photos and music. Both of those applications have obvious mobile markets too. People take albums (both music and photo) to other people houses and have carried photos in wallets, and music on tape etc for years. Digital libraries of music and photos existed long before MP3 players and iPod photo.
Most people do not use their computers to store their DVDs. There is simply no advantage. DivX and MP4 is a noticably lower quality, in most instances you have to watch the video at your computer, and even by modern storage standards they take up a significant percentage of your harddisk. Also, it is a truely time consuming task. A full rip, strip, and encode is not only technically challenging for Joe Sixpack it takes the best part of 24 hours (for h.264) per disk.
The upshot of this is that you and I may have video content on our harddrives, but most people just don't. Even if they did, how many people actually want to be seen using a video player in the street? We're already being told to hide our ear buds for fear of getting mugged, and its dangerous to walk/drive whilst concentrating on video content.
I'm not saying that there isn't a market. I'm just saying its tiny. By the time Joe Sixpack is really demanding this technology over portable DVD players, laptops will be small enough and cheap enough to make a mass product unnecessary.
Even if Apple start to sell movies / TV on ITMS, I still don't think that they will release a iVid or iPod Video as the market is big enough with desktop and laptops. I could see apple producing a small box that connects to a network and allows you to watch network content like the XBox with XBMC - hope fully with the same form factor as the Airport and a bluetooth remote control.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Why would a mod waste a mod point on a Score 0 anonymous coward that was anything other than a racist/gay/? baiting troll.
Metamod moderator of parent as complete fuckwit.
Parent is not a troll. Parent is insightful.
Grandparent is fucking stupid.
Plugging the USP plug into my Xandros Linux system caused the file manager to come up automatically. I could just drag .ogg files into the MUSIC folder and they became visible to the player.
It has a built-in microphone so you can directly record audio (in MP3 format). It also has a line input so that you can record audio from another source. It even has an FM receiver that works very well.
I was impressed with the complement of cables that came with it: USB extender cable, line input cable, ear buds, and also a lanyard and belt adapter.
I have a 512M model. According to the manual, there is also a 1G model, but I didn't know about it before I ordered.
Plugging it into the USB port charges the batteries. I haven't used it enough to have a sense of how long the built-in battery lasts. I used it for several hours today without any problems.
So far I'm very pleased with this unit and I am very happy to support companies which support OGG.
FYI: iOPS F350 512MB MP3/FM Digital Audio Player
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
Well, for those amongst us who already own a stack of notebooks it's a relief to have something else to spend money on. ;-)
Besides: if all you want to do on the road is watch movies the form factor is probably worth it (if you can stand such a small screen). I notice a really big difference in portability between my 12" and 15" powerbooks and as a consequence they both serve different tasks and get taken along on different occasions. So I can surely imagine that the difference between a 12" form-factor notebook and this device is at least as hefty.
The only thing I don't grok about this thing is that you're supposed to leave it at home to record tv-shows, while you're also supposed to take it with you to watch recorded stuff. That's extremely unpractical and therefore a fundamental design flaw. If I had one it would probably be retired in a drawer after a few months of agony fighting myself over wether to take it or leave it every time I leave the house.
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
an mp3 player for 6th grade graduation present, and we go thru the sunday paper adds, and look on line and the result...the ipod has games and comes in neat colors, end of story.. I don't think the even heard my comment that having an AA battery, as opposed to a sealed internal proprietary, is a good idea..
yeah and don't tell her that the /. mods are a bunch of clueless morons. "Troll" for the parent? oy, vey. Some mods really are just wastes of skin.
Try visiting dapreview.net and posting in the "Which DAP to buy?" forum.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
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I couldn't disagree more. I'm not sure about the size overall but I think this is the start of a video revolution. If the cards play right, this might lead to the downfall one of the big music companies.
As more stuff like this comes out people will be asking "why doesn't this come with video". People will ask that all music come with video and probably on DVD's. The music companies will greet with the same fanfare they gave mp3's and this will piss people off. Then people will figure out they could make their OWN videos to songs they like with something like Flash or Video cameras, and some will start repackaging songs into video competing (illegaly) with the big companies. This will catch on and most likely Apple will get tired of dealing with the music companies and get in the game themselves. They will become a music label as well as a distributor. Then they will they put out a mandate that all songs produced by their artists have to come with a video, even if cheap an simple. They will sell on DVD or electronically and it will start to catch on, kicking the big music people in the nads. Eventually Apples competitors will try to do the same Real, Yahoo, M$, and all the various pay to download music places.
Add this in with where all the other places people will be getting used to video (vidoe voip/skype, video for cellphone calls, possible podcasting of tv for things like Tivo, etc...). A lot is coming and these little devices will play nicely into that revolution.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Some of the proteins being processed the last couple of weeks have been unusually difficult to fold. The average run time should be between 10 and 20 hours. However, because of the unpredictable variability, the times can range anywhere from 2 hours to over 200 hours, occasionally.