Great video player and photo viewer, bad everything else

NOTE: This review is for the Archos 605 Wifi with 4 GB of flash RAM. The 80 GB 605 Wifi has the same form factor, though probably with a slightly reduced battery life.

Like a lot of people, I have been looking for a video player to use on my daily commute. I have a 80 GB 5g iPod on which I watched videos. The problem with that is simple - a 2.5 inch screen is simply too small.

I waited patiently for the iPod touch, but Apple did several things that really irritated me. First, all of the existing video out cables I have no longer work with the new iPods - apple now forces you to buy an Apple video cable with an Apple authentication chip. Apple has also once again tried to lock down the iPod database in order to force you to use iTunes. iTunes is a good program, but can get as slow as molasses when the music database gets large. In any case, this is not an iTunes review. The final nail in my iPod touch plan was the negative black effect problems documented on various Mac blogs. It seems that Apple, in a cost savings plan, went with cheaper and lower quality screens. This seems to be a trend at Apple, coming on the heel of the furor caused by Apple using lower quality 6 bit LCDs instead of normal 8 bit LCDs on 20" iMacs.

Looking around, I stumbled across the Archos 605 Wifi. The 4 GB flash version sold for $199 at Amazon. The specs looked good - the Archos had a 4.3 inch 800x480 screen, where the iPod touch sports only a 3.5" 480x320 screen. For that price and with these specs, I ordered one on the spot.

PACKAGING

The Archos comes in a shinny white box that includes a pouch, earphones of subpar quality (though on the same level as iPod white ear phones), a custom USB data cable, some documentation, and of course, the Archos 605 unit.

STARTING UP

I didn't bother reading the documentation. I took the USB cable, and plugged in the Archos. Unfortunately, Archos felt the need to use yet another proprietary USB cable. Why I do not know. It does not offer any features that a normal mini-USB would not provide. And is not for docking, as they have yet another interface on the bottom for the Archos docks that you may buy. After being plugged in, the Archos asks you if you want to transfer media, or simply charge the device. The latter allows you to continue doing whatever you want with the device while drawing power from the proprietary USB cable. The former locks the device and puts it into the media transfer mode.

TRANSFERING MEDIA

The Archos 605 can be used in two unmanaged disc modes, or the managed MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) mode.

In the hard drive modes, the Archos shows up as a lettered drive, and you see all the raw directories. The two different modes allows you to do a manual catalog of the media after you disconnect the device, or have the device do an automatic catalog. Unlike the iPod, where you have to use iTunes (or a compatible) media manager, you can add media to the Archos in an ad-hoc fashion. The downside for this is that there is no centralized media database on the device which is updated by iTunes. Therefore, the device has to go through the entire directory structure to scan for each and every media file. Now, for a 4 GB flash version, it takes about 5 seconds total. I suspect that for the 160 GB version, it would take significantly longer.

Using the hard drive mode, of course, gives you the option of accidentally deleting vital system files. A friend trashed her Sansa MP3 player because she renamed the directory from Music to Музыка. Using the MTP mode is much safer, as the MTP drivers in Windows XP/Vista automatically handles placing media in the right locations, and hides all system files and directories. When you plug in the Archos in MTP mode, one or more devices simply show up under My Computers in Windows Explorer. One icon represent the "a605f - Internal Memory", and the other represents the "a605f - SD/MMC Card" if you have any SD cards plugged into the SD/MMC slot.

PHOTO VIEWER

I started out by using the photo viewer application. The photos look absolutely amazing on this device. Archos really makes good use of the full 800x480. The Archos screen is matte (the way it should be, IMO), not shiny, and for some reason does not seem to show finger prints at all. The color accuracy on this screen is pretty good - I got myself a test pattern image, and at least all the steps on the grey scale ramp were clearly distinguishable with no loss of detail in either the shadows or the highlights.

Once you select an image to view, you can zoom in and out with both on screen controls as well as the physical buttons on the side. I personally prefer the buttons. You can also slide around in a zoomed in image with your fingers ala the iPod touch. However, the Archos does not understand gestures.

VIDEOS

This is probably the reason why people buy the Archos, as it is apparently reputed to be the best video player there is. I ripped some test clips from Digital Video Essentials and played them back on the Archos. The video quality was impressive to say the least. This was only a cursory test, let's talk about video in more detail.

Format Support
The Archos supports many formats, but for most of them you have to buy plugins at $20 a pop. Out of the box, Archos supports only WMV and MPEG 4 video. However, the built-in MP4 video is all but useless, as most popular MP4 encoders encode the audio in the AAC format, which requires an additional $20 "podcast" plug-in which provides support for H.264 and AAC. This plug-in is required if you want to play any iPod compatible videos on the Archos 605.

Now, the Archos display has 800 by 480 sqaure pixels for an aspect ratio of 1.67 (width) to 1 (height). This is slightly narrower than the 1.78 to 1 ratio of an HDTV or of a DVD in the anamorphic format. That is, on an anamorphically enhanced DVD (which is about every major DVD out there), you have 720 pixels horizontally, and 480 pixels vertically, representing an image that is 16x9. Needless to say, each pixel is not a square - rather, the width of each pixel is about 1.2 times that of the height. Why is this important? The Archos 605 does not understand anamorphic video.

Let's say you rip an episode of Heros, and encode it as WMV (which supports non-square pixels) with 720x480 pixels straight from the DVD, you can watch this on the PC with Windows Media Player, everything will be fine - Media Player is smart enough to recognize the aspect ratio tag and display it properly. However, if you play it on the Archos 605, it thinks the pixels are square, and displays the image with an 1.5 width to height ratio, and not 1.78 - so everyone looks tall and skinny.

The only way around this is to encode your video to use square pixels. So I tried to encode the DVD as 800x450 (notice, not480). The Archos then complained that the video size is too big. Their web site claims that you can encode videos up to DVD resolution, but neglect to tell you that if you do so, the video cannot be played properly. To display the full DVD resolution, you would either have to buy the HD add-on plugin (presumably for $20 as it is not available yet), which allows resolution higher than 720x480, or to buy the MPEG2 plugin, which allows you to play a raw DVD VOB file. I finally gave up, and simply encoded all my videos to be 720x405, which is the highest resolution I can achieve while retaining the proper aspect ratio.

This aspect ratio flag issue exist only for WMV, MPEG4 and H.264 does not seem to support - at least the encoders I used - Nero, TMPEnc, and QuickTime Pro) - doesn't seem to support non-square pixels. So you are forced to encode for a maximum width of 720 square pixels.

As for codec support, I successfully tested the Archos 605 with WMV9 Simple Profile, WMV9 Advanced Profile (VC-1), MPEG4 and H.264 using the iPod video container. WM10 Pro 5.1 audio does not work. Apparently you have to buy yet another plug-in (see the pattern here?) to support 5.1. Well, maybe I'm splitting hairs here - none of the Apple products support even half of these codecs. Oh yes, there is yet another plug-in (which you have to pay for) which supports XVID and DIVX.

Oh, even though the Archos web site claims that this device supports subtitles, I found that embedded subtitles in MP4 files does not work. Nor have I found proper support or embedded chapter marks.

While playing the video, you can use the on-screen slider (with your finger) to move to particular time spots within the video. You can also use the control buttons on the side - which is what I prefer. However, when you stop a video, and go back to the same video, it starts from the beginning! There is no way to automatically save your position; for this you have to select the bookmark menu, save the position, and before you start playing the video again, select resume from yet another menu. Oh, and the audio level is way too low. If you are in a subway, let's hope you have a pair of good noise cancelling or noise blocking headphones. On my Bose QC3, and with the volume set to max while playing an encoded video that has normalized audio, the volume level is barely tolerable.

AUDIO FILES

Let's not mince words here - the Archos is a terrible audio player. The interface is clunky at best, and downright obnoxious at worst. The best way to generate a "play-list" seems to be to dump the files you want into a single directory. However, even using the directory to browse files has its own problems. What is the problem? Foreign language support. Ah yes, but Archos is a French company, surely these frogs, who represent all that is good in the world - including Belgian Fries - would do better than these mono-lingual Palo Alto engineers in that cultural waste-land known as The United States? Not so. The Archos can display foreign language characters, but only if you switch the entire user interface to that language. It supports only one code-page at once, even though the filenames are encoded in Unicode and works perfectly with that elegantly engineered piece of software we all know - Windows Explorer. God forbid that you should put some Finnish, Polish, and Russian songs in the same directory. God forbid that you may even listen to Hong Kong pop. Pick your language, and the rest appears as gibberish. And that's assuming that you actually want the interface to be in that language. I may understand Russian and Chinese, but I can't read computer menus in either language to save my life. The frogs may have had a president smart enough to keep them out of Iraq, but they get trounced by les americans (from either Palo Alto or Redmond) when it comes to multi-lingual support. Conclusion? I'll carry my iPod in my back-pack if I need music!

WEB BROWSER

For another $30, you may buy the optional Opera web browser plug-in. For the sake of this review, I did so, though not without some major trauma. This is because I bought the 605 right after its release, and Archos' website was not set up to support the 605. I simply could not buy the plug-in from the device itself even after I registered myself online. I had to dig through their website, buy the plug-ins I wanted, download the license file, put the 605 into HD mount mode, copy the license files to the device's root directory, and let the device update the license. See how simple that was? A less determined person would have given up a long time ago. Incidentally, did I tell you that their support site still does not have the 605 listed?

Anyway, browsing with the Opera plug-in is a bit slow. While it looks better then Safari on the iPhone, the Archos user interface again gets in the way. Selecting a link can often be difficult. Double tapping a link zooms in, and doesn't select the link, as one would expect. To select, you have to put your finger on it for a second, and lift. It's really quite annoying. Oh, at this thing doesn't support JavaScript, so almost all Web 2.0 websites like flickr only works in a half-assed fashion - though Flickr's flash based slide-show did work - something that doesn't even work on Firefox.

CONCLUSIONS

If you want the best video player out there and can put up with the quirks, get the Archos 605 Wifi. If you simply want ease of use and a good interface, and can deal with a smaller screen, get the iPod touch.

The Archos has a great screen, and can be a great photo viewer and a video player. However, the video player is crippled by sub-par format support, and the arbitrary limits placed upon it to sell for plug-ins. The music player mode is almost unusable. The one thing that the Archos can do is to copy from from a SD memory card, so that you can use this device to both backup and view JPEG files (no raw support, sorry) from your digital camera. Oh, on top of all this, you have a proprietary USB cable and horrendous battery life. I'd say if you're viewing a DVD resolution movie (from the SD flash), you'd probably get 3 hours max.

Also, when you use this device, carry a paper clip with you. I've found that I have managed to lock this device on average of once a day - that is, I had to hard reset it with a paper clip.