Archos JukeBox AV480 (80 GB) Digital Media Player

Background
We have had a 50 CD jukebox for 6 years. When we purchased it, we knew CD management would be a challenge and, after 6 years of CD acquisition, we had finally run out of patience. We had also bought a DVD player with MP3 capability but have found its on-screen menu to be too limiting for sorting through large quantities of titles. Also the management of the physical MP3 CDs was becoming an issue.

We decided to try an iPod music jukebox that we would hook up to our home theater system. Once we started shopping, we became concerned with the limited capacity of current iPods. Our current library is close to 20GB and we were concerned that 20GB was too small for an device that would form the heart of our home music library. We quickly discovered the Archos line with their 80GB capacity. We had run across a clearance Archos with 10GB on eBay for $99 so we knew we could have a truly portable companion to our main jukebox at low cost.

The added capabilities of storing and displaying digital photos, and recording TV made the Archos very attractive. We could imagine recording music videos from the music channel. Also the TV capability promised a user-friendly interface for finding music and this added value to any potential jukebox.

The next issue was that we had no local vendor selling the Archos line. We were able to try out the RCA Lyra pocket video player but, with only 20GB, it was judged marginal for our purposes. So off we went on the Internet looking for Archos. We found one rating on epinions, several short evaluations on a competitive site, and a user group on Yahoo. The Yahoo group was very helpful in providing us with a visceral feeling for the vendor and its machines and user interfaces. It raised a concern though because the AV480 had a serious reliability problem when first introduced this summer. This made us want to seek out only the high volume retailers to make sure that we would get a unit manufactured recently.

We eventually decided on Comp-u-plus located in NY. It had a good price ($645) and they seemed to be known for quick shipping dates and reasonable customer service. We almost bought at newegg.com but they raised the price by $10 while we were evaluating. Shipping was $40 via Fedex (but that was from NY to Vancouver Canada so it was not too bad), and the machine arrived at our door 7 days after ordering. (Fedex charged an extra $7 for paying and collecting the sales taxes. We purchased the 3-year extended warranty to compensate for the lack of local service for another $29.)

Initial impressions
The machine has worked flawlessly and it seems to be very intuitive. The printed manuals are not very good. They are in multiple languages so very bulky for the basic content supplied. The on-line manuals are better, as are the on-line FAQs. You need to rely on the 300 series FAQs for some aspects of the multimedia functions (www.archos.com). This will likely be fixed soon.

The AV480 is about twice the footprint of an iPod and about twice as thick too. The black leather carrying case is well-made, sturdy and easy-to-use. It has a belt loop for traveling. You must remove the AV480 from the case to use the display. This is understandable given the large size of the display screen (3.8"). The display is crisp and clear (320x240 pixels). The players boots up in 5 seconds to the icon-based main menu screen. The screen provides icons for all the major functions. The control buttons are easy to use and the feel of the player is very good and solid. It comes loaded with sample music, photos and videos so you can start exploring right away. The built-in Lithium-Ion battery needs 4 hours to charge fully, so we made sure to plug the player in for this exploring. The power cord is a little short (66") and tends to pull out too easily. We fixed this with an elastic band. The AV480 will play videos for 4.5 hours, enough for most plane rides, and it will play audio (with the display off) for 16 hours. The display turns off automatically when not used, and the player also shuts off if no music is playing. You can browse for other selections while your MP3s play.

The AV480 comes with lots of wires. There is a pair of earbuds complete with volume control that do a good job of rendering the sound. The internal speaker is handy for quick views and for showing the player off the interested friends. There is an IR wire (77") for controlling the cable box, TV or VCR. This is great for expanding its usefulness as a digital video recorder. There are international power adapters supplied. The video docking station has nice long wires (76") that enable connection for video input (or SVHS) and output (no SVHS). The base contains the IR port for the included remote control, and plug-ins for power adapter, IR transmitter and keyboard. One problem is that the power adapter must be used with the docking station. This means unplugging it whenever you go portable for more than 4 hours to take along. We will probably buy a second power adapter to avoid this step. It is a 5 volt, 1.6 amp unit so should be easy to duplicate. The USB hookup is very nice. It shows up as an external Jukebox drive and has all the functions of any Windows drive. This makes it really easy to load up the machine with MP3s and JPG photos. You can also copy the recorded videos to your PC for playback or long-term storage on DVD. One feature is that Archos provides a wizard on the Windows toolbar to tell you when it is safe to unplug the player from the USB. The problem is that it often says not to unplug even when it seems safe to do so (no file access activity). Even closing all the programs running does not stop this. We just make sure there is no copying going on then unplug anyway. We use the karenware.com replicator to synchronize the files on the player with my PC. It is automatic and saves sitting there waiting for the copying to complete. It only copies newer files and you can set up masks to copy only MP3s from a directory. We also keep all my latest photo JPGs synchronized too.

Music
There are many nice features here. You can set the player to play singles, albums, directories, all items found on a search or random and repeat. This eliminates the need for many playlists. You can search by artist, album, title, genre, year and playlist. You should get an MP3 tag editor and get your MP3 tags in shape. For example, some CD rippers only save one tag for an entire album, and you should have the tag on every song for maximum value from the search capability. Also, many songs from the Internet may have no tags or incorrect tags. Finally, sometimes when you get a single song from an album off the Internet, the tag will come up on an album search even though you only have that one song from the album. In this case, we change the tag to say "Greatest Hits" to avoid clutter in our album searches. You can set your tags to any values that you want to support your planned use of the search capability. We use DBPower for ripping and tags.

The AV480 shows all the MP3 information that you would see on your PC (WindowsXP), including a display of the album cover if it has been included in the tag. ArcLibrary on the AV480 will rebuild the music index for searching when you request it after adding more MP3s. The PLaylist feature is very intuitive using what they call their "double browser" because it displays the source songs in the left panel and the emerging playlist in the right panel. List can be created and edited very easily and it is all done while the music is playing. One really smart feature is how they handle long file names. For example, some of our album names are very long because we included other information in the name; the AV480 will shuttle the long name back and forth in the display panel enabling you to see the whole name without taking any specific action.

Photographs
If you have already organized your digital photos on your PC, you can just copy the structure over and you are ready to go. Slideshow and thumbnails views are standard and operate by directory as a default. Four or nine thumbnails are both supported. One nice feature is the ability to rotate the display of photos so if you have a lot of portrait shots, they will fill up the screen if you rotate the photo and the player by 90 degrees. You can also zoom in one a photo by 2x, 4x or 6x. The AV480 is a great portable backup for the digital picture libraries and a really easy way to take them along and show them personally or on TV for larger audiences. Never be without those great shots again!

Videos
The AV480 and its remote make recording very easy. Just follow the on-screen prompts to set timed recordings and their channels. You can set a standard set of behavior such as to start recording 2 minutes early and keep going for 2 minutes after the end time to compensate for timing discrepancies in broadcasting. The recording settings screen shows the instructions over whatever is playing on the video feed so you don't miss what you are watching while setting up the next recording. Unfortunately there is no commercial skip feature so you will have to keep the remote handy when viewing.

Playing video files from other sources requires that they have voice interleaved AVI format. There are some utilities that will transform them but this is an extra step needed before loading them onto the player. This would be necessary for things like music videos, classic movies, and training material. You may need to buy a SCART switch box so you can watch normal TV, then switch it to record on the AV480. This depends on your current setup. Also it only records from video feed and not coax cable. If you have a coax only setup, you will need to purchase converters. Most current VCRs have video out that will serve as a feed to the Archos. Prerecorded DVDs with copy protection can only be copied into low resolution for replay on the go. This will work for personal viewing on an airplane, but not for showing on big screen TV.

Recording for playback on the Archos or PC only is accomplished at much lower storage (half) and smaller size than for the regular TV set. At regular TV quality, the AV480 will store about 75 hours depending on how much music and photo storage you have used (about 1gb/hr). When TV output is selected, the internal display is turned off. There is good editing capabilities on the AV480 so you can easily cut and crop the recording. This is handy for selecting music videos recorded off cable and saving them by themselves. It can also be used to cut the commercials from regular recordings before viewing them. The keys like advance frame work slowly at first then speed up when you hold them down. This makes navigation to the desire portions easy. It automatically renames each saved crop or cut as "VIDnnnn (date - time) EDIT001" etc. These can be renamed to something meaningful using the supplied on-screen keyboard, or done more easily when connected to the PC.

Audio Recording
Recording on the AV480 is very simple. Just select the Audio Recording icon and press start. Be close to the built-in microphone as the range is limited. You can edit the WAV file to blank out sections of the recording. Or just keep making separate files. The main issues are volume and that only WAV files are recorded. DBPower is the utility that we use and it will convert the AVI files to MP3s on the PC.

General
The browser gives full access to all the files on the AV480. It comes loaded with all the software needed on your PC as well as multiple language versions. These programs, and the demo media files, can be deleted, or archived to CD-R with your PC to make extra room for your own recorded files. About 1gb is taken up with the operating system and these files. The browser is like Windows Explorer. Navigation is assisted with 3 programmable function keys that changed their use based on the specific activity at the time.

Refer to the dimension of the TV Cradle below if you are mounting it beside a VCR/DVD unit in a special shelf. The IR port is at the bottom and so the shelf must not have a large lip on it. The remote adds more function with keys to control recording and playback, as well as a numeric pad for channel numbers.

Program Scheduling
Yahoo.com provides local programming schedules for many areas throughout the world. Set up your MyYahoo TV account on your PC to your local provider (Cable or Satellite) schedules. Add any desired recordings to your Yahoo Calendar with the click of your mouse. Then copy your calendar to the AV480 and your recording times and channels are set. This is a better way than specifying them all on the Archos. However, you need to get that USB connected and the included cable is only 39" long. We have a laptop so we just go to the TV cradle. They recommend that the Archos power be plugged in when connected to the PC. This may be just a data integrity caution. Once we have the extra power supply, we can just take the AV480 over to the PC for synchronizations. The IR control for the remote supports most of the brands of VCR and satellite/cable converter so the process is pretty automatic. You can record what you are viewing, and, if you are connected via the VCR, you can copy VHS tapes. This is a simple way of archiving older tapes to disk then using your PC to rip them to CDs.

Software
The included software includes Adobe Acrobat to read the manuals, MP4SP to convert videos files into Archos format, MP9 version of Windows Media Player, Virtual Dub for manipulating/cutting/editing the video files (e.g. making video sound interleaved) to support the player and output from the player, MusicMatch for managing and acquiring MP3s off the Internet and ArcSP. The software gets the job done. We have my own editors so have just perused what is supplied. Virtual Dub is very handy for going through video and clipping sections or inserting narrative on the PC. We can see using this instead of voice over recording for some of my home movies. It can also select and save sections of recorded TV. You have to beware the file sizes though. We also got DivX to play the TV recordings on my PC in full screen and it works well. The Musicmatch supplied is version 8.0 and we downloaded version 9.1 off of their web site. Yahoo is in the process of buying Musicmatch so they will be around a while longer. Their web service also supports streaming audio services on the PC. Downloads cost $.99 with albums going for $9.99! It will rip audio CDs to disk as MP3s. It will also create playlists for the AV480. Mac users will use iTunes instead.

Installation
Plug in the power and USB cable. Install the appropriate software on your PC from the Data directories on the Archos disk. Synchronize the \Music and \Photo directories with your music and photo libraries respectively, Unplug your VCR cable from your TV and replace it with the TV Cradle cable. (You now have a spare video cable.) With this hookup, your VCR will only play through the AV480. This means that you must set the AV480 to record. It will display the output from the VCR in a reduced window (in my case it fills 28" of the 32" screen in the mode of viewing while recording). We have a combination VCR/DVD player. The DVD plays directly to the TV Video 1 input via SVHS, but will record (if desired) simultaneously on the AV480. (We can also play output directly to TV channel 3 using the VCR/TV switch on the VCR.)

Plug in and route the IR control cable to either the Cable/Satellite box IR port or the VCR IR port. There are instructions for how to find the best place to stick the IR output repeater. Enjoy!

Detailed Specifications
~ 3.8" TFT Screen with up to 320x240 resolution
~ 80GB Hard Drive Capacity - for any one of or combination of:
... o Record from 80 to 320 hours of TV programs and video content using the TV cradle
... o Store and play up to 1200 hours of music as WMA or MP3 files (including protected files) or
... o Store and view up to 800,000 JPEG/BMP photos
... o Listen to and record off the radio (with Optional FM Radio & Remote Control)
~ Enjoy up to 4.5 hours of video playback or 16 hours of audio playback with the internal Lithium Ion battery
~ Copy any files from a PC with USB 2.0 port (or lower)
~ Connect with a TV, VCR or Cable/Satellite Receiver (with composite video in/out or SVHS video in )
~ Program recordings using the Recording Scheduler, which simulates your remote control device with IR out
... o MPEG-4 Simple Profile compliant AVI (DivX 4.0 & 5.0 & XviD)
... o Up to 640x304 @ 30 frames/sec (NTSC)
... o up to 640x368 @ 25 frames/sec (PAL)
... o Up to 640 x 480 at lower frame rates
... o 660 x 468 pixels on Internal TFT screen
... o MP3 stereo sound track
~ Video playback: MPEG-4 SP with MP3 or ADPCM stereo sound, near DVD quality up to 704x480 @ 30 f/s, AVI file format
... o Compatible XviD and DivX 4.0 & 5.0
~ Video recording: MPEG-4 SP near SVCD quality with up to 512x384 @ 30 f/s with ADPCM stereo sound, in AVI format.
~ Built-in microphone and speaker - Record WAV files for later editing and playback
~ Music playback: Stereo MP3 decoding @ 30-320 kb/s CBR & VBR, WMA (including protected files), WAV (PCM & ADPCM)
~ Compact Flash Type I card reader (extra cost adapter for SD/SM/MMF/Memory Stick(Pro) will use reader slot)
~ Unit Size: 4.9" x 3.1" x 1" / 11 ounces
~ TV Cradle Size with AV480 mounted: 5.5" x 4.3" x 5.5"
~ Cables supplied: Power Adapter (with universal plugs), USB, earbuds with volume control, IR output, TV in/out
~ Works with Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000 or XP / Macintosh 9.2 or X (10.2.4)
~ Supplied PC software includes Asian fonts, iTunes plug-ins, Virtual Dub, MusicMatch, MP9, MP4SP, ArcSP and Acrobat
~ User group: groups.yahoo.com/group/archosmultimedia/

Bottom Line
This machine is amazing. At 80GB it is twice the disk capacity of our laptop. It is very user-friendly, the way PCs should be. The large screen color display makes all three functions more effective. The MP3 library capability exceeded our expectations, and the video and photos capability is a great bonus. It has enabled us to defer the purchase of a DVR/DVD-R for our entertainment system. It also opens some new flexibility for traveling to Mexico for a month with our music library and some prerecorded videos. We had used our laptop for private viewing of DVDs in prior years but this PVR is a much more flexible solution.