2. Complexities and Cost

But that’s not the end of the configuration you need to do. If you want to see content from your PC or NAS box on the TV+, you need to make it available over UPnP; Windows will detect the TV+ on your network, and you’ll be able to choose whether to share your content or not.

Setting up TV recording requires another step, because the TV+ doesn’t include any kind of tuner or receiver. That means it will work with any set-top box or tuner, without you having to worry about connecting an aerial or other input, but it also means that it doesn’t know what channels you can receive. To get this working, you have to register your TV+ on the Archos Web site (using your PC), which involves reading a serial number in tiny print from the bottom of the box and finding the product number, which is buried in the TV+ menus.

Choose your country and TV service, and you’ll be offered the ArchosLink software for your PC, which can transfer the EPG to your Archos device; this is what you’d use for an Archos PMP without Wi-Fi. You don’t need to install this-the TV+ will retrieve the EPG once you tell it to update itself-but the instructions don’t make this at all clear. You may also need an extra free plug-in for your TV service; there’s one for the Disk Network, for example. You can choose to have the TV+ download EPG updates automatically, or get a reminder and download manually each time. If the EPG doesn’t get the channel codes correct for your service you can change them; you can also remove channels you’re not interested in from the channel guide and add new channels.

The Archos TV+ EPG has a simple interface.

Leaving aside the PC software, you can see upcoming program details on your TV and pick what to record from a simple interface; expect to do plenty of scrolling if you receive a lot of channels. This shows a week’s worth of programs, and you can get a brief description for each, but you can’t select an entire series to record as you can with most PVRs (and with Windows Media Center). The EPG is based on the TVTV service, and you get a year’s free access with the TV+; after that you’ll have to pay for EPG details.

The TV+ has a built-in infrared repeater that it uses to change the channel to record the right program. You can’t record one program and watch another, and it’s not clear how to cancel one recording if you decide you’d prefer another program instead. Archos doesn’t include any guidance on positioning this unit, but we found that it worked well both above and beneath a set top box. You’ll need to leave your set top box turned on for recordings to work.

Online Content

Registering on the Archos site also gives you access to the content portal. There are a handful of free videos to download, but this is mainly a way of buying or renting commercial titles from providers like CinemaNow. The choice isn’t wide, and the movies aren’t particularly recent.

Archos partners have movies to download; it’s nothing like the slick experience of the iTunes store, though.

If you want to use the Web browser, video podcast, DVD playback and 5.1 surround sound, there’s more setting up to do: and you have to shell out for the plug-ins at $20 a piece. Again, the Archos instructions tell you to select these on the Web site, download them to your PC and transfer them to the Archos device. When the download links didn’t work after we’d registered for the plug-ins, we were able to download them directly on the TV+, but once again the instructions wouldn’t lead you to believe that you could do that.

The browser is the same version of Opera you can get for the Archos 605, so you can visit YouTube, read Gmail, check news sites or look up the show you’ve recorded on IMDB. Activating the Opera plug-in also gives you a range of widgets: a currency converter, a “data vault” for storing Web passwords, a news reader, weather forecast, calculator and so on. The screen image looks good on newer TVs, but older CRTs can show a rather shaky picture. The QWERTY remote makes it easy to type in URLs, but the mouse is a little slow to use. And remember that Web sites that look good in front of your nose can be harder to read when you’re sitting on the sofa, a few feet from the screen.

The TV+ remote has plenty of navigation options, but it’s still a slow way to work with Web pages.