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"Fat32 Strikes Again!"
3.5 starson by chaosmenPros: Great video quality.
Cons: File Size Limit 2B
Summary: I was thrilled to see that Archos was now supporting MPEG2 and VOB files on their new 605wi player.
I even bought all the add-ons, especially, the MPG2 Decoder.
I tried dragging over some VOB and MPG2 files, but any file over 2GB would fail. I could sometimes get them to go, but overall, it would lock up the player.
I contacted technical support and they confirmed that the player does in fact have a 2GB file limit due to it being FAT32.
Its inconceivable that ARCHOS would create a large and roomy hard disk player that can play VOB/MPG2, have us pay more for that feature, but then wont allow a standard movie (which often exceeds 2GB) to be moved to it.
If anyone knows how to reformat the hard drive with NTFS and of course, keep all the supporting OS, I'd love to know
If you buy this product, you might have to wait like the rest of us for a hack that will allow it to play large video files.
For now, I am converting vids to WMV, which adds hours of converison time. It would great to have them in a non-compressed format.
- 2 replies to this review
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I have converted all my DVDs that I own to DIVX format. I use one program to rip them to my HD and then batch them using Dr. DIVX. They run over night and bam, come morning, I can shuffle them right over to my Archos for my watching pleasure. It's better to batch things overnight. I can generally convert 3 movies overnight while I sleep....720x480, 1100 avg bitrate, .mp3 audio. It sounds and looks as good as the DVD when played back on my TV...32 inch Sony. Each movie comes out to be around 600mb...but with the 100gb of my Archos av500 and 160gb of my 605, I got no worries.<br><br>-J
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I'm not sure how you are getting the VOB files that are greater than 2 gb unles you are ripping DVD movies to single VOB files or recording somehow in VOB format. if you are looking to watch uncompressed DVD video, just copy and paste the entire video_ts directory over to the archos and then choose any of the VOB files in the directory to play. This should basicly break the movie down into individual VOB files that are all smaller than 2 gb and the BUP file in the directory acts as a compiler putting these together as the full movie + extras. I have done this on several PCs using Windows Media Player and most of the time it works. So, in theory, this may work on the archos. Personally, I prefer quantity over quality in the number of movies I can take with me. I rip into mp4 or h.264 and basically you get a great looking video at 1000 kbps on a small 4.3" screen. This usually translates to a 2 hour feature length movie in a file size of 1gb or less. You can ramp up the video quality to 1500 or 2000 kbps and audio to 128 kbps and have close to the appearence of DVD quality on this small screen. However, If you output to a TV, you will probably see noticeable pixelation. Hope this helps. Just my opinion. I do not own the archos, YET, as I am waiting to find out if the "podcast plug-in" will play any mpeg-4 file with the .mp4 extension or if it will just work with vids encoded in the h.264 codec. So far, I have not received a satisfactory answer on this issue. And since I have several vids in mpeg-4 but not h.264, this is important to me because like you said, I do not want to have to spend hours re-encoding. If you have any info on this matter, a reply would be appreciated.
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