Archos DVR Station Gen 5 for 405, 605, and 705 Players

• Play back on TV in DVD quality (in video formats supported by your ARCHOS) through the composite, S-video, RGB or YPbPr video outputs.
• Listen to music on your stereo system. Listen to 5.1 sound included in videos on your home cinema system through the SPDIF output.
• Connect your PC, hard disk or most mass storage devices to play or to transfer content (video, photos,music).
• Charge your ARCHOS device.
• Stream Media from your PC to your TV using your WiFi home network.

Yes, the station is a must have for the 05 series, but be seriously warned . . . . I have had three stations, 2 of the remotes have died so far, and both after the 30 day warranty, and ARCHOS tell me that since I did not purchase it from them it is not their problem and I am waiting to see if any Amazon merchants will source or sell the remotes only . . . . by the way, just in case you don't know, the station is all but useless without the remote.

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A "DVR" without a tuner seems hardly worthwhile. You can't connect your cable to the unit, you're going to have something else to tune and convert your cable signal to composite, RGB, or S-Video. Then you're going to have to carefully position the IR emitter of the Archos DVR station so that it's pointed into the IR receiver of your tuner. In all likelihood this means you can't put the DVR station where you want it.

You'll be better off without this. Get a tuner for your computer, use it as your DVR and transfer the recordings via USB.

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The DVR Station works as described. The DVR function is a significant portion of the 605 capability. It was a snap to cable it, and the IR setup, to control the S-Video source, was one of the easiest yet. The programming guide was also easy to configure, and use (not sure about the fee structure after the "free" one year period).

I also liked the external charger (didn't have to wait 24 hours to charge before "playing with it"). The docking station makes it easy to connect & disconnect, which is often during the setup phase.

I gave it only four stars because of the lack of a Tuner.

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overall, the DVR station is very good at its jobs. as a video recorder, it is excellent. there are some learning curve items, but once you get smart, it works as advertised. the only issue i have is the charging side of the DVR station. my Archos 605 gets very warm while charging. this heat will cause the battery to have a reduced lifecycle.

since it is the only game in town. you will have to get one.

i am not a crackpot.

I needed to copy content from my cable DVR box to the Archos for viewing on business trips. The 'Travel DVR adapter' would have done the job, but for $25 more, you get the full DVR docking station. This provides a nice, stable place to leave the A605 while it's charging, you get AV output connections as well as input, AND you get the QWERTY remote control. Buy the travel DVR and you're paying nearly $60 for nothing more than a socket that does input only. I'm now $500 into this system, what with the browser, codecs and input adapters.

It's kind of clunky looking very square and a weird, slope-like design. I found the 'DVR adapter' in the original A605 box luckily the misses hadn't thrown it away. This is a piece of silver plastic that you have to clip onto the top of the DVR station to enable your particular type of Gen5 Archos to sit on top. It's quite tricky to dock the A605 without straining the connectors you have to insert it into a channel between 2 pieces of plastic with about a +/2° tolerance. if you get it right, it drops straight in.

I haven't even bothered trying the DVR functionality yet, since I already have a cable DVR box. All I do is set the cable DVR playing and make the Archos do a manually started but timed finish record from its A/V inputs. Incidentally, according to Archos tech support the Travel DVR can do the timed manual recording that I wanted; it just doesn't enable the DVR scheduler. This isn't mentioned at all in the ridiculously sparse user documentation.

Once the A605 is docked, it enables the 'Recorder' menu icon. The choice of encoding options is rather limited, with only AVI files with compressed WAV audio possible. I leave the aspect ratio settings on 'Auto' and it seems to figure out what size the input video signal is. Video bitrate choices are 500, 1000 or 1500kbps. Audio is either 32k or 48k. On the highest quality setting, files aren't that small about 700MB for a 30 min TV show. I can get a whole DVD movie into that space using Handbrake. I will do some experimenting with settings and post results...

I have tried using the video editing features built into the A605 firmware. This enables you to remove sections from media e.g. commercials from a TV program. You have to manually scroll through the video file and set a start/end point for each section you want to cut out. You can only set one pair of start/end points at a time. When viewing the edited content, I notice that it always fails to cut the last 0.5s or so of video even though I placed the marks accurately. At that point you can choose whether to save your edited file to a new file, which takes AGES since it's reading and writing several GB from/to the same HDD lots of head movement.