Hi all
This is a bit of a "long shot" but have any of you got / used an Archos 7? [1]. I saw this on QVC (of all places!) yesterday and it looks perfect for my needs which are
1) to transfer a huge library of VHS to PC
2) to be able to play those videos and my 60Gb of music back through a big screen TV
To me, though - the key question is to do with recording. According to the demo on QVC - to transfer video footage (from _any_ source) it's a question of playing it into the Archos and recording it realtime - the same way Audacity does for example. So a DVD must be played and recorded - not ripped. I'm not too bothered about this because my main purpose is to transfer VHS but it strikes me as odd that (even if it's just for copyright reasons) you can play a DVD in realtime and record it but you can't just rip it.
The other thing - and this is key - once I have my videos from VHS in the device - there's going to be a darn sight more than 160Gb of them - I have 400+ 4 hour tapes. No problem in itself - copy a few - move them over to my NAS or whatever then start again but the key is quality. I don't care if my DVDs don't transfer in DVD quality because that's not my main purpose but if I'm going to lose quality when I transfer VHS that's a showstopper.
Questions:
1) What's the quality like when transferring? The QVC demo called it "near DVD quality" which would be fine for me - not too bothered about copying DVDs but definitely don't want to lose anything in transferring VHS tapes.
2) Are the video files available from the Archos or (a la Itunes) are they mucked about with so it's hard to find them? For example on the ipod itself as most owners will know - you have some sort of xml file (IIRC) that says 1.mp3 is Kylie, 2.mp3 is Jason etc etc. Anyone know which codec it uses?
Cheers
Rob
[1]
http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_7/index.html?country=bd&lang=en&p=image3
