By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, December 11, 2005

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.)

Archos has not done too well at this competition, however, and the Pocket Dish's lamentable interface -- on and off the screen -- suggests why.

To begin, the AV700E just has too many buttons, a dozen in all. Six of them can navigate through things on the screen, and two can select things in various modes-- and the navigation and selection buttons usually fall on opposite ends of the screen. The button that turns this thing on doesn't also turn it off.

The array of menus and status indicators on the screen needs editing just as badly. The software presents either too much information (how much do you care about the "bit rate" of the currently playing MP3 file?) or too little (its listing of TV shows omits dates, times and channels). Common tasks require too many taps of all those buttons and frequent waits: Shuffling a music playlist requires navigating to a sub-menu and selecting the last of five items there, after first waiting a few seconds for the player to read in the list of songs in that playlist.

Tragically enough, the Pocket Dish's effortless video-transfer capability somehow broke in mid-review. The Dish Network recorder stopped recognizing the player when connected, even though I could still transfer music and photos from a computer to the player.

The helpful Archos technician I reached at a toll-free number listed on the Pocket Dish Web site walked me through some troubleshooting routines but couldn't explain why the Pocket Dish player couldn't make itself known to the Dish DVR. So he suggested I call Dish Network. The equally helpful Dish technician I reached on my next call walked me through some other troubleshooting routines but didn't have any great answers to explain why the DVR wouldn't recognize the Pocket Dish player -- so he suggested I call Archos.

I can still applaud Dish Network's intentions, even if I can't endorse its implementation of them. It and other companies have time to get this right -- TiVo's plans to upgrade its TiVo ToGo software to add support for the iPod and Sony's PlayStation Portable could be a step in that direction.

In the meantime, Dish, TiVo, DirecTV, Comcast, Cox and other big providers of these video recorders are overdue to add a simpler but equally convenient video-sharing feature, one that doesn't require customers to buy $300 to $600 worth of portable electronics: Build a DVD recorder into every digital video recorder.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.