- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 19 reviews Back to product review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"A step up from the AV500?"
Pros: Bigger drive (160Gb) and screen
Cons: have to buy extra codecs from archos for video playback
Summary: An upgrade to the older AV500 (100Gb drive)? Maybe...its slightly bigger screen (pro), but the button arrangement is not as easy as the AV500 (con). I like the live preview (pro) t boots up MUCH slower than the AV500 (con), taking nearly 10seconds for a fully-loaded AV504. Ouch. While it plays AVI and DIVX out-of-box (pro), you must purchase separate codecs for any MP4, mpeg4, MPG2 file (con) from Archos, and they are NOT available yet. Ouch. Also, I hate the non-standard USB input (you need their USB dongle) for power or transfer. Finally, you need to the extra $100 DVstation for any live recording (it was built-in on the AV500...).
My advice? If you dont need the 160Gb, look for an older AV500 (100Gb) instead.
- 1 reply to this review
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Another reason to stay away from this model is that the ArcLibrary that indexes MP3 tags can only handle abount 9500 - 10,000 tags. So if you have a huge music library like me and you want to take advantage of all that space, you have to end up browsing the drive as the index will only show a portion of the tracks on the device. This index problem also means that there may be problems reading track numbers in the tag if your file has album art. So even if the index sees the track, it may not be sorted properly within the album in track order.
If you are happy with the AV500, then stick with it and avoid this not ready for primetime player.
Archos 504 (160GB):
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