Originally Posted by Earnie74:
“I think the A2 or A3 can do what ive described well though?”
Yup, it can indeed .... and everything you'd need to do it is in the box (unless they've changed that since I bought mine).
The A2/A3 is perfectly capable of recoding from your TV, it just isn't as full functioned a PVR as the Archos units are.
If you want download DivX files and just chuck 'em on and play 'em, it's the one I'd go for still. Battery life still beats the Archos units and you don't need to buy any extra hardware or firmware.
If you went for the A3 over the A2, it still does everything the A2 did (would be a step down otherwise) but with a higher res screen, component out, the USB host has been upgraded to 2.0 speed I think and it can handle HD files to some degree (if you're counting on HD playback, I'd do a bit of research round this area first as I believe there are question marks over what it can and can't handle). But, for the 700mb/1.4gb DivX files you commonly get from torrent sites, the A2/A3/Q5 are easily as good, if not better, than pretty much any other player on the market. (It won't play 100% of downloaded files ..... no standalone will be it a DVD player or a portable. Theres always going to be a few oddities out there where the guy encoding it has tweaked a few advanced DivX settings. I'd say the A2 plays around 90%+ of downloaded DivX/Xvid without any issues.)
The Archos players do have a few features the A2 doesn't have (but at the time I bought the A2, the 604 was it's competitor and it didn't have any of this new stuff like streaming). But the A3 and Q5 are pretty much on a par with anything Archos have on offer. Each has their strong and weak areas but when I weighed it all up when I was looking for a PMP, the A2 came out on top.
If nothing else, the fantastic battery life, amazing audio quality and wide ranging CODEC support virtually sealed the deal for me.