Posted by nkarnold

This is Google Docs http://docs.google.com for now:

Purchased direct from Archos and received today in the UK and in Sweden.


View the initial reports from users in the forum at: Forum.ArchosFans.com - Mini 605 review

The Archos Content Portal is the real revolution that comes with this new generation. It can give you access to the worlds video content in a couple of user friendly clicks on the touch-screen or clicks on the remote control if you have connected your Archos to your TV or HDTV. Videos play instantly. There is support for buying videos definately, renting them and probably also that there could be the possibillity of subscribing for unlimited access to thousands of movies. Imagine having access to the worlds complete collection of films for a fixed 5-10 dollar monthly fee. This is what’s possible will happen with the Archos Content Portal. Add to this a whole universe of user generated content, with a way to monetize that user generated content so that its production value will increase. And the fact that Archos let’s you access all that wordwide content on-the-go at any hotspot and at home in your living room, that’s a two-in-one solution. I believe that this is the feature that will truely expand the market for portable multimedia players.

Thanks to ArchosLounge.net for posting this video:

Download a higher quality version of this video: ACP.mp4 (116mb)

The Register is reporting that the Plymouth headmounted camera trials using Archos to record from headmounted cameras was successfull.

An evaluation of the pilot run by Devon and Cornwall Constabulary showed that, compared with incidents when the cameras were not used, the body worn video devices led to an increase in the number of convictions of offenders. Their footage provided clear evidence that made it difficult for offenders to deny their involvement, leading to less paperwork for the police, earlier guilty pleas, less time spent in court and an increase in convictions.

For the year long pilot 300 Plymouth police officers were trained to use any of the 50 cameras available during day and night patrols. The evaluation found that violent crime was reduced by 8 per cent in the pilot sectors, compared to a 1 per cent reduction across other sectors. The number of incidents in which people were wounded were reduced by 18 per cent in pilot areas of the city, compared to no change in other areas.

Plymouth police using the new technology increased their detection of violent crime by 40 per cent and arrests for violent crime went up by 85 per cent.

Alongside the Plymouth report, the Home Office has published guidance to standardise police procedures for body worn video devices. The document says that police should tell people they are being recorded and that recordings should not be made of general patrolling duties, unless this is part of a specific operation such as a football match.

Thanks to Archos, and the british love for having security cameras everywhere, crime is going down in the UK.

So now the UK is going to use 3 million pounds to equipe the police nationwide with this system. Is the new 605 WiFi 160GB with battery docks going to be the new pocket video recorder of choice for the UK police? It is 55 grams lighter, 3 millimeters thinner, offers a better screen, and an instant-on OS. I guess that there must be some clever video storage and organisation software that the police might be using with the Archos docked using USB2 to their computer systems, unless they just store all recordings on some hard drives, since basically it is only to be used if the police officer or the judge needs some evidence material from a certain event.

Nastyatak of ArchosLounge has performed some more tests using a test page I setup at http://archosfans.com/progress.html

Following are formats that give the abillity to playback progressively and instantly:

- DivX in the .avi container
- DivX in the .divx container
- H264 in the .mov container
- Mp4 in the .mp4 container
- WMV
- FLV

What does this mean? It means that any http link you can find on the Internet to videos in those formats will offer the choice of eigther Playing instantly and downloading to a specific folder or Downloading only.

What this means is that anyone can design a Video-on-demand Interface using any video format to work directly on the Archos 5G.

Currently normally embedded DivX, WMV or Quicktime video files are not working. I would expect it to be possible for Archos to detect when such an embedded OBJECT tag is present in the HTML page and if it is in auto-play mode or not. Then display the popup asking the user if he wants to Play instantly and download or Download only. Since this is a 4.3″ 800×480 screen, we’d mostly like to deal with any type of multimedia file being streamed in Full-screen mode than to have to deal with tiny embedded windows of content inside of the high resolution browser.

While we are waiting for fully detailed tests of the exact way that Flash is supported, and of possible official details about current and future firmware updates concerning Flash support, here is what I think is going on:

- Flash 9 is supported

BUT

- Only .flv Flash Video files can be processed in full screen using the DSP processor when they are detected to be embedded in the HTML page. When that HTML page is loaded and the .flv is detected, Archos asks if that should be played in Full Screen, and only in Full Screen mode can it utilise the full power of the Digital Signal Processing chip (a very powerfull Texas Instruments DSP that supports video up to HD resolution)

Supported Flash 9 .flv video streaming sites supported are reported to be following:

- YouTube.com
- video.google.com
- Dailymotion.com
- Kewego.com

To remind you, with the 605 WiFi we are getting COMPLETE instant streaming access, in full screen, at full framerates and at the full resolution to the whole video contents of each of those sites.

- Flash files that are in the .swf container are displayed on the Archos, BUT, right now the touch-screen does not interact with those .swf files and the .swf playback is slow BECAUSE the .swf is currently only processed with the ARM core of the processor.

Flash 9 video sites that use .swf to display video are currently not supported:

- Vpod.tv
- Sevenload.com
- vids.myspace.com
- metacafe.com

Other popular .swf “Shockwave Flash” implementations that are displayed and animated only using the ARM core and offer no interaction using the touch-screen currently are:
- Flash Games
- Webradio and embedded music using Flash
- Websites with Flash navigation of Flash functions

The question is following: (hopefully that Archos can respond officially)

Will a firmware update manage to take those .swf files and hand them over to the DSP chip to handle them in Full screen mode just as currently Flash 9 .flv files are. I guess that Archos, Adobe and Opera might be working on this right now, .swf files are more complex since they do interaction, they can grab information from a database, they can process stuff on the client and on the server side.

Thus I hope that Archos will provide us with more official detailed information about this soon.

I am not the total expert in Flash and Texas Instruments DaVinci processor of the Archos 605 WiFi at all, so if you have more knowledge about how Flash works and how Archos could possibly make all flash work over on the DSP chip, then please post in the forum: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?p=24577

Download higher quality Mp4 version

Thanks to ArchosLounge.net for doing these tests!!

Why does support for the progressive download of DivX in the AVI container matter so much? Well this means you can access all videos from the whole Internet immediately on the Archos without waiting for the download to be completed. And once you have finished playing it once it is stored on your Archos so that you can watch it again without having to re-download it.

What this means is, if you have a collection of terrabytes of DivX films at your home, using a low power router with a HTTP server on it, and connecting NAS or usb-hard drives to that router, or having your computer always-on at home hosting this HTTP server, this means you could access all your personal collection of terrabytes of DivX films from all over the Internet, you could password protect it for security, thus having instant worldwide access to your complete personal multimedia collection, as long as your home broadband internet connection has at least 1-2mbit/s upload, enough to provide at least as much upload bitrate as most of the videos in your collection are. I have 2mbit/s upload, so this will work great for me. This is better than ORB, Slingbox, AMD Live and Sony TV Anywhere since this is native full DivX instant playback.

Go check it out at http://www.archoslounge.net/Le-605-WiFi-sur-le-grill.html (in french)

.srt subtitles work very well, there even is a menu to resize or de-activate the subtitles.

http://gmail.com : works perfectly (I don’t know yet if all AJAX features in Gmail are smooth, I’d like to see more testing of compatibillity, usabillity and performance)

http://last.fm : the flash player for this kind of Flash-based audio player does not seem to work (at least not for now, there seems to be flash displaying but does not let the user interact with those in terms of clicking on certain Flash features, games, flash sites and such.)

Comparative video of the browsing experience with the Archos 605 WiFi compared with the iPhone is going to be posted at GenerationMp3.com soon.

http://metacafe.com : does not work, upon trying to play flash video from that site, it asks about installing a new version of flash

http://video.google.com : WORKS GREAT! Full screen streaming of Google Video is great and smooth.

http://sevenload.com : The website works but it’s not possible to watch the videos. I’ve heard from desktop Linux users that they also are having problems with Sevenload. It might be using some newer Flash features that might not be available yet for Linux.

http://kewego.com : This video site works fine and the flash videos play smoothly in full screen mode.

Full screen flash video playback works perfectly and overall is reported to be very impressive. But embedded “small video window in browser” mode is not smooth. It is to be seen if that mode becomes smooth upon the video being completely buffered as with the Nokia N800’s latest Flash 9 firmware update. I guess Archos has figured to do a great trick in the full screen flash playback mode where the browser CPU and memory usage is suspended giving full access to the CPU, Memory and DSP for the flash video playback.

If you have more ideas for things that should be tested, come and post in this thread in the forum.

If I had the 605 WiFi right now, I would try and test following:

- Which is the speed of the browser compared to the 604 WiFi, compared to the Nokia N800 and compared to the Apple iPhone.

- Which is the quality of the video streaming over Samba and Upnp compared with the 604 WiFi. In terms of being able to smoothly fast forward anywhere in the video, load thumbnails, resume playback, bookmark and such.

- Which is the performance of AJAX in the browser compared with the 604 WiFi, the Nokia N800 and the Apple iPhone.

- Is there a speed improvement in the use of the new user interface compared with the 604 WiFi.

These things we already know that are the advances of the 605 WiFi compared to the 604 WiFi:

Price -40% (-60% for 4GB)
Weight -30% (-45% for 4GB)
Thickness -20%
Screen resolution x3
Video playback resolution x2
Startup time (wake-up from sleep) /10

Those are some of new features:
Video-on-demand
Flash video playback in full screen
Progressive download of videos launched from the browser
Automatic firmware upgrade
Direct download of the plug-ins
Secured one-click payments
Wake-up from sleep-mode (to test: how long does the battery last in sleep-mode)
Upnp file-sharing

Do you have more suggestions for describing briefly the advantages of the new Archos 605 WiFi and the 5th generation? That is, while I haven’t tested the 605 WiFi yet, I’m sure it’s got many positive surprises in store for us, and I am eagerly looking forward to read more initial reports from ArchosLounge.net and GenerationMp3.com