portable media player

JamesN

ok, i confess i did make one of these before, but budget has changed significantly.

aiming for around £150 i think. Cheaper the better, but i dont want to sacrifice quality.

What sort of stuff can i expect to get for that kind of money? screen size is well, as big as possible, but obviously not making it unportable.

Thanks!

lynn2

I have an Archos AV 700 and just love it. It stores music, photos and programmes from the TV...you just record TV programmes straight to the Archos, or play a DVD as normal and record it to your Archos. You can also set the timer and record programmes that way. You can also play games.
I take it on holiday and watch TV programmes on the plane and also on long car journeys.
I have a spare battery for it too.
I also make sure I have a few films on it, so we have something to watch in the evening if we don't fancy going out one night whilst on holiday.
I use portable speakers for film viewing, but headphones work great for normal use.
I'm not sure whether you can still buy this model.
Archos have other models that might be in your price range, but you will need to search places like Amazon.
There are other makes of media players of course, but I am more than happy with Archos.

JamesN

so can you not just copy files over, like a film from ur pc to ur archos? you have to record it?

lynn2

You would have to covert them first using Archos MPG4 Translator and Virtual Dub which come with the Archos.
I have only converted Youtube videos and put them on my Archos using those programmes.
See the following from the manual...

"Video files that come from your digital camcorder, sent to you via e-mail, or which are freely available on the
Internet are encoded in many different ways. If not already in the proper MPEG-4 Simple Profile or WMV9 Simple
Profile format, a transformation operation must be done in order that these video files can be played by the
AV 700. This transformation process is called re-encoding.
There are basically two ways to do this; 1) Use the Synchronize button in Windows Media® Player 10 or 2) Use
the PC tools which are available on the AV 700’s hard drive. The first method is very simple and merely requires
that you synchronize a video file in your Media Player library to your AV 700. You do not have much control in
this converting process though and Windows Media® Player determines which video types it will and will not reencode.
The second method, though it requires some learning, will allow you to have much more control over the
final quality of the re-encoded (converted) video file. It is described below. There are other tools available on the
Internet, some free and some for sale, that can also convert your video files into the appropriate MPEG-4 video
file format for the AV 700. See the web site https://www.mpegmobile.com for a list of a few of them."