Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97434 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Archos
• Model: 500664
• Released on: 2004-07-06
• Dimensions: 3.07" h x 4.92" w x .79" l, .62 pounds
• Hard Disk: 20GB
• Display size: 3.5

Manufacturer's Description
Geared towards families, TV enthusiasts and gadget lovers, the Pocket Video Recorder AV400 experience starts in the living room where you can record television shows and movies directly from a TV, VCR, or cable/satellite receiver with a convenient one-time set-up TV Cradle. At the same time, the AV400 takes personal entertainment enjoyment far beyond the living room, where consumers can watch videos and view photos on a large colour LCD screen, listen to and record music, and transfer photos from a digital camera and data files from a PC or Macintosh.

The Pocket Video Recorder AV400 was designed with consumer ease of use in mind and presents many new features unseen in a portable video player, including a sleek and small design, 20-gigabyte to 100-gigabyte hard disk capacity, removable battery for extended life (20-gigabyte version), one-time set-up TV Cradle, an external speaker for enjoying music and video without headphones, best video playback quality 1 , and a built-in Compact Flash reader for transferring photos directly from digital cameras. These new features make the AV400 a uniquely powerful device, yet slim, light and easy to use.

Portable Entertainment Starts with the Pocket Digital Video Recorder
To be placed on or near the TV set, the TV Cradle is a docking station for the AV400 that allows you to record directly from a TV, VCR or cable/satellite tuner. Once the TV Cradle is connected to the TV, VCR or cable/satellite receiver for the first time, you will not have to reconnect the cables again, just dock the AV400 and you are ready to record or view your files on the TV. The AV400 Recording Scheduler directly controls the tuner inside your VCR or cable/satellite receiver to automatically adjust the channel and record based on the time and duration of the schedule. Further, the AV400 Scheduler will synchronize with Yahoo TV Guide (where available) from the Internet so you can prepare your recordings for the week or month in advance.

Far More than a Portable Music Player with Video, Photos, Music and More
The new Pocket Video Recorder AV400 allows you to:

Record and Play Back Video: Record between 80 and up to 400 hours of TV programs and video content, or between 40 and up to 200 2 full-length movies in MPEG-4 video, at DVD quality and with CD quality stereo sound. Listen with a built-in speaker or headphones.

Schedule Video Recording: Program recordings using the Recording Scheduler, which directly controls the VCR or set-top box tuner to schedule and automatically record TV programming.

Enjoy a Large, Colour LCD Screen: The AV400 features a high-resolution, 3.5-inch or 3.8- inch colour LCD screen 3 or view directly on a TV, PC or other video output device.

Record and Listen to Music: The newly designed music player lets you record between 300 and up to 1500 3 hours of music, with playback in MP3, WMA or WAV formats using a built-in speaker or headphones. The ARCHOS ARClibrary software automatically tags tracks for easy viewing and organization.

Store and Manage Photos: Store and view hundreds of thousands 3 of JPEG photos on the AV400, and view as a slide show. Instantly transfer photos from computers using USB 2.0 or from memory cards using the built-in CompactFlash" reader. The Pocket Video Recorder AV400 can also support SD, MMC, SmartMedia", Memory Stick ® or Memory Stick Pro thanks to the optional 4-in adapter.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

A highly recommended gadget
This is a great gadget and well worth the extra over a similar capacity Ipod. Yes its bigger, but its still very portable. It's solidly built and comes with a good protective case. The LCD screen is very good in comparison to the competitors and is more than watchable while travelling. The output to TV is also good (Hi-res is fine on a 28" widescreen). It isn't DVD quality but then it doesn't claim to be. Sound quality is great through headphones and OK through the buit in speaker.

The only issues I've had with it are (and they are only niggles - I would buy one again without question):
1 - You need to be confident with computers and have some spare time to learn to record your DVDs & other video files so that they play properly with no sound delay.
2 - I had a few problems with ID3 Tags on Mp3 files that I know are OK.
3 - The cradle has so many wires that it makes it a bit less portable
4 - Spare battery would be useful but is quite expensive

Overall the video capabilities make it more than a match for any MP3 player and it is simply the best PVP (apart from the 80GB version of course).

does everything - films, TV, music, pics, files...
This is an unbelievably cool piece of kit.
You can basically use this as a video recorder (i.e. to tape TV programs) so you can throw your VCR out for starters.
You can also tape videos and DVD onto it, and watch full length films on the bus, tube, train etc.
The 20GB capacity is perfectly adequate for my uses, allowing you to store several films, plenty of music and photos at any one time. And if you want to free up some space you can just download the files onto a computer - after all, do you really need 50 films on it at once?
This is great because it acts as:
An mp3 player
A video recorder
A portable DVD player
A picture viewer
An extra hard disk

This is particularly impressive as an iPod may cost £230, and a 1GB USB pen drive is about £65, so its really not worth bothering with them - just get this.
I'm very surprised there arent more people with these. Maybe theyre about to catch on.
Get one now.

Gadgetry at it's finest!!
After looking around at many different media players and audio devices I found this one to be much the others out apart from one main difference, that you can directly record from your TV. At first I wasn't too sure what would files would be compatible with the ARchos AV400 but after owning it for a few months they introduced new 'firmware' which is play for sure which means it is now compatible with media player on the windows platform.

To be honest I love this litle thing now and use at every available option. I store recorded DVD's from my collection on it at about 1.3gig each and when I run out of space the USB 2.0 connection comes in handy when storing them on my Laptop. Also the audio player on it is great.

I would recommend it instead of an Ipod Photo any day as it has so many more functions for only a small amount more.

Only one problem however, I have 1 dead pixel :( What a pain!

Thumbs up from me!