Number 1 – recorded from Sky Plus. I mentioned in an earlier post that most things concerned with Sky Plus are usually doomed to failure. Everyone in the house (even the hamster) is actually forbidden to physically touch the Sky Plus box on the grounds that “it’s working, don’t touch it”. So the thought of moving it to plug some extra cables in filled me with dread. However, after carefully plugging in said cables and attaching to the Archos’ DVR Station, recording was very easy. The quality of the results is excellent and – how cool is this? – the Archos is able to edit the results (chop off over-runs, remove the adverts, that sort of thing).
Number 2 – set up UPnP. Of course, you all know that UPnP stands for ‘Universal Plug and Play’. Not wanting to break the sacred covenant of IT people I didn’t read the manual, but it didn’t take long to add a UPnP service to the ThinkPad, share a folder, and then stream video and browse photos from that folder wirelessly to the Archos. I probably won’t use it that much, but it’s cool and important to get these things working. Mind you, having the DVR Station means that it is possible to stream movies or photos from the ‘Pad to the Archos and then to the television.
Number 3 – work in progress… content captured from Sky Plus converted into a format that will then work on the wife’s iPod touch. This project is extremely important for a) chick-flick ‘The Holiday’ and b) Take That live on New Year’s Eve. However, it’s not working… yet.
I’ve just ordered this, it seems to do loads of different things some of which it sounds like you need to pay extra for. Is there a website somewhere with all the free and pay for upgrades? It would be good to have both software and hard ware for UK customers all on one site?
Also I read somewhere that Archos are going to make the browser free soon, is this true??
Cheers, DL
If you’ve seen my latest post you’ll now know that this is a bit of a sore point. I hope you have better luck with your’s. Right now I feel like advising you to send it straight back and buy an iPod touch. I’ve owned an iPod for years, so has the wife, and not one problem in all that time.
Darren, if it helps, I used Videora’s iPod Converter software from: –
http://videora.com/
This enabled me to convert a MPEG that I’d recorded via my Hauppauge Win-TV USB nadger ( Freeview in a little box ) to the .MP4 format that the iPod supports. Watching Terminator 3 and Hackers on a small screen – it’s an experience 🙂
Thanks Dave… we sorted out the iPod conversion a while back, I got an excellent utility from Xilisoft. There’s quite a few utilities on the market.
I have tried to connect my archos 605 to my sky digibox but can get no sound or picture. It switches the digibox on and chooses the correct channel but thats about it. It can pick up the cable input but not the digibox. any advice
@5 – I assume you have the DVR (base) station that the 605 sits in… there’s a cable diagram which shows how to connect the cables in the Sky box and then into the base station.
You can also find the diagram here…
http://archos.com/support/download/manuals/connection_guide_dvr_station_v1.1.pdf