Archos Pocket Video Recorder

[James Fee]

"Ever dreamed of watching "SportsCenter" or "South Park" on your way to work? The idea of "anywhere/anytime" film and TV content certainly has appeal, but has its time really come? Archos seems to think so, and its AV400 personal digital video recorder (DVR) makes it all possible. Well, mostly possible, at least. We took the AV400 for a spin and the news is more good than bad. So, if you're looking to take your favorite shows and movies with you in a pocket-sized device, read on—because the AV400 might just be your new best friend."

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/0,1311,sz=1&i=78472,00.jpg

A portable DVR sounds great I guess for those who must be able to take their saved American Idol recordings when they travel, but I'm just not sure how anyone really would want to spend upwards of $750 on something that just has too many limitations (such as what where they thinking using MPEG-4?).

[Felix Torres]

A portable DVR sounds great I guess for those who must be able to take their saved American Idol recordings when they travel, but I'm just not sure how anyone really would want to spend upwards of $750 on something that just has too many limitations (such as what where they thinking using MPEG-4?).

Did they really have a choice, though?

The only two advanced, commercially-viable video codecs on the market are MPEG4 (of which most current *implementations* suck rivets) and WMV9, which a spawn of the devil.
What other choice does an upstanding french company have but to go with MPEG4 and hope the devil doesn't get his due when the blue-laser wars are over.
A-B-M rules, don't you know?

And no, commercially viable does not include DIVX at this point.
For one thing, there are no native encoder chips out there yet, so the ecosystem is limited to PCs.

The biggest knock on the Archos is the price, though.
Part of it is due to the onboard recording, but $750 is likely beyond what the market will bear. Not in the face of the Samsung PMC being discounted to the $350 range before intro and the RCA Lyra approaching $299. (If Thomson can get that low, Archos has to come down at least 30%...)

At $700+, it needs to have an Apple logo on it if its going to sell. :twisted:

[Tim Williamson]

Isn't the picture quality look awesome! I mean, I can barely even see any pixelation... :roll: :wink:

[James Fee]

Well they are using MPEG-4......

[Gary Sheynkman]

well....in a couple of weeks we might have a unit in..so we'll see

personally i think it is a very promising product and I believe will be a very good alternative to the PMC

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

750 is probably the MSRP.. AV420 is going here for under 600.