Portable DVR From Dish Is a Nice Idea but Needs Work

The $599 AV700E is among the Pocket Dish models offered by Dish Network. (By Julia Ewan -- The Washington Post)

A new digital video recorder from satellite broadcaster Dish Network allows you to take around copies of TV programs on a small plastic box that fits in a jacket pocket.

So do a lot of other DVRs -- but with them, that box is a VHS tape. With the Dish model, the box is a portable media player with a color screen and storage for dozens of movies.

Somebody should have offered that option a long time ago. But most digital video recorders can't provide anything better than that videotape copy -- and even that requires grabbing a set of audio-video cables, connecting a separate VCR (or perhaps a DVD recorder), then duplicating a recording in real time.

That's a woefully inefficient way to do things in the digital age. It's faster to download the same program off peer-to-peer file-sharing networks or the limited but growing selection at Apple's iTunes Music Store -- as long as you're okay with either stealing the new copy or spending another $2 for something you already paid for, in the form of your cable or satellite bill.

Dish Network's idea is smarter and fairer. Each of the three Pocket Dish models built for it by Igny, France-based Archos -- the $329 AV402E, the $499 AV500E and the $599 AV700E -- can plug into the USB 2.0 ports on Dish's high-end Dish Player 942 for a quick transfer of programs you've recorded.

(Dish sells the 942 to new customers for $250, but existing customers get no discount and pay the full $699. The Englewood, Colo., firm says it hopes to add Pocket Dish support to older recorders with slower USB 1.1 ports.)

Using an AV700E that I tested was, at first, blissfully unlike most of my earlier misadventures in digital video. I plugged it into the 942, and a message on the TV asked me to select recordings to copy to the Pocket Dish. I chose a movie and six half-hour shows with the 942's remote, and the transfer began.

About 20 minutes later, they were tucked away on the Pocket Dish in a "Dish Network" folder -- but with titles truncated after 18 characters and spaces replaced by underscores, which made an episode of "The Daily Show With John Stewart" appear as "The_Daily_Show_W_1."

At 1 pound, 5.5 ounces with headphones and 4 by 8 inches, the AV700E is no iPod replacement, but it's light enough to carry in a bag or backpack. Its 37 gigabytes of available storage can easily hold two dozen movies, with room left over for music and photos. (The two cheaper Pocket Dish models offer about three-quarters and half that capacity.)

You can watch recordings on the Pocket Dish's seven-inch screen or on any TV. The screen, limited to 262,000 colors and a 480-by-234-pixel resolution, made video appear worse than it was, but when plugged into a TV with the included audio and video cables, Pocket Dish video looked as sharp as it did from the DVR.

That large screen didn't do this thing's battery any favors: Watching movies or playing music exhausted the battery in just over four hours and 15 minutes with the display on full time. (The battery can be replaced; Archos sells extras for $50.)

Archos's day job is making audio and video players that compete with the iPod and other devices, so Pocket Dish models can also serve as music jukeboxes (they handle MP3 and Windows Media Audio files, including downloads from most non-iTunes stores) and portable photo albums. The AV700E can also copy pictures and video from some cameras and camcorders connected with a USB cable, record from any source with analog video or audio outputs, and play some games. (The demos included on the AV700E looked remarkably lame.)