Archos TV+ 250GB review

Most of us have hundreds of music and video files stored on our PCs. The problem is that most PCs are stuck in studies or bedrooms, and not in the living room where you usually want to listen to music or watch videos.

An easy way to get your digital music and video content onto your hi-fi or TV is to use a media streaming device such as this, which will also play back media files from its internal hard disk and record TV shows.

The Archos TV+'s black and silver finish looks great. When you start to wire it up, though, things get messy. The rear panel has HDMI, S-video, component and composite video outputs, but no Scart for traditional TV sets. Instead, the TV+ comes with two Scart breakout cables. One plugs into the Archos' component output sockets and into your TV, while the other runs from your digital TV or cable box to the TV+'s input sockets. It works well enough, but means the rear of the unit becomes a rat's nest of wiring.

Once connected, the unit works as a pass-through device, so it can record your TV's signal and will display TV when it's in standby mode.

Share and share alike

The clear user manual takes you through sharing media over your network, and once this is set up you can access the music and video files on your PC from the TV+'s menu. The box can play MP3, WMA and WAV audio files, and WMV and MPEG-4 video files, as long as they're encoded with MP3 audio. You can sort your audio files by artist, album, genre and year, so it's easy to find the music you want to play. Unfortunately, you can't play back AAC audio or MPEG-2 video files unless you buy the optional plug-ins, costing around £12 each. There's no support for high definition (HD) video files.

The Archos TV+ differs from most media streamers in having an internal hard disk. You can plug the box straight into your PC's USB port to transfer files to this, or plug in a USB flash drive or external hard disk: the TV+ can play media files straight from the external storage, or you can copy the files to its own hard disk using its file manager program. You can also browse the web from the TV+, but the Opera web browser is another optional plug-in, costing £20. Considering the number of free web browsers available for the PC, and the already high price demanded by Archos, this seems a bit much.

The final string to the TV+'s bow is, logically enough, TV recording. It's easy to record whatever channel is currently on your digital TV or cable box, but scheduling recordings in advance is a bit harder, as the TV+ has no built-in tuner. Instead, you have to set up its infra-red transmitter to control your digital TV or cable box by selecting the manufacturer of your equipment and manually trying a selection of infra-red codes to see which works.

We tried this with Panasonic and Goodmans digital TV boxes, and couldn't get the TV+ to control either; nor would we expect it to work with Virgin Media (formerly NTL/Telewest) boxes, as they use a different type of infra-red signal.

Archos' TV+ is a reasonable media streamer, and the internal hard disk, along with optional web browsing, makes it a possible cut-price alternative to a media centre PC. However, the lack of a built-in tuner makes its TV recording function practically useless, and it's very expensive even before you've added the cost of the plug-ins. We'd rather have a standalone media streamer and a dedicated digital TV or cable hard disk recorder, which together would cost less than the TV+.