3. Watching and Syncing

The Archos interface is certainly clean, with just eight buttons plus the Menu options, but you have to move up and down between then with the arrow buttons because there aren’t any dedicated shortcut buttons. This is the same simple interface as on the Archos PMPs, and although it’s easy to use, it’s not as convenient with a remote as on a touchscreen. When you select a button and navigate through the various content options, you can only jump back a screen at a time; there’s no shortcut back to the main menu.

The Archos TV+ interface.

Music, video and pictures that are on the TV+, or on a Windows PC from which you’re sharing content, show up automatically under the relevant buttons. They are organized by metadata like genre, actor, series, and rating, as well as by playlist and folders. If you’re playing content from a PC, the TV+ starts copying it across and then tries to play it; that means it can take some time before you discover that a file can’t play. The number of codecs supported is disappointing: WMV video files played, but AVI files recorded on a Casio digital camera didn’t. Most DivX and XviD files play, and the playback quality can be excellent, but some XviD files encoded with large frame sizes aren’t supported. The TV+ plays MP3, WMA and WAV audio files. Pay for the plug-ins and you can also play AAC and AC3, MPEG-2 and H.264 video podcasts.

Similarly, recorded TV shows up automatically under the Video button. Select a program to play and you get a busy interface with a volume strip and various icons in the corner, but you can use the navigation buttons to fast forward and rewind and the OK button to pause and play, and the interface disappears after a few seconds. You can only scroll through the on-screen icons with the Menu button, so there’s a not a lot of point to displaying them on screen in the first place-they’re another leftover from the touchscreen interface. Still, they let you choose the speed and screen format, save frames as thumbnails or wallpaper images, and change the video player settings. You can also mark recorded programs as adult, if you want to limit who can watch or copy them from the TV+.

Whether your TV signal is analog or digital, what the TV+ is recording comes through the analog connection and gets converted to MPEG 2. That means you don’t get the same quality as the original. It’s certainly watchable, and if you’re watching on the small screen of a media player the resolution is perfectly acceptable, but you will notice the difference from your usual TV service.

Transferring files to a media player is refreshingly simple. Plug any USB device into the TV+, from a flash drive to a laptop or media player, and the connected device appears in split-screen mode so you can see the media files on both devices and play or copy them. If you have an Archos player with Wi-Fi, you can copy recorded TV onto it without plugging in. You can see the TV+ in the Windows Network Neighborhood, but you can’t access content directly from the device this way.

Plug in to the Archos TV+ USB port to move TV recordings to any USB device.