Archos Jukebox Multimedia (20Gb)
I owned a JBMM for about eight months. It contained about 9Gb of music and
about 12 films. The idea was great, a little(ish) box that could play mp3s,
play divX movies, view images taken with digital cameras, be used as a portable
20Gb HDD, record from a line-in or built in mic and display all of these activities
on either a built in colour screen or an external monitor. The company also
promised add on modules that would turn the device into a digtal VCR, digital
camera/camcorder, and FM radio. When I bought my JBMM it came with the "Photo
Module" which consisted of CompactFlash and SmartMedia card readers that
connected to the port on the bottom of the JBMM.
As soon as I got home I couldn’t wait to play with it. I was a little nervous
as I had read very differing reviews. I charged it and all was well, the screen
was clear and sharp, the audio quality was fantastic, the interface was a
little irritating but not too difficult to navigate and the movie clips were
astounding. Of course straight away I wanted to put some of my films on it.
I looked through the instruction book and there was a brief mention about
having to put the film through the software provided, easy I thought, so I
tried to copy a DVD on to it.
After a few days I had finally found software that would actually do what
I wanted but it took about five hours to copy the film from DVD then another
hour and a half to convert the film to a format the JBMM would recognise.
Fair enough I thought, I’ll just leave it on over night to process DVDs. The
second film I tried didn’t work properly, the sound was completely out of
synch with the film. A few more days passed and I thought I’d found out how
to correct the problem but it didn’t work. I tried following at least five
methods and none of them worked, I posted to the archosmultimedia group but
no one could help. From then on it was hit and miss as to whether the film
would work or not.
As
I said above I managed to convert about twelve films succesfully in the
time I had the player. The ones that converted were brilliant they were easy
to watch on the built in screen and looked really good on a TV too. The only
problems I noticed were on scenes where they were all shades of a colour (i.e.
the bed scene in "Run Lola Run") but this is a limitation of the
divX format not the machine.
The mp3 player side of the machine was good although a little slow to navigate
and I was annoyed to discover you couldn’t continue listening to music while
looking at pictures. I had about two thousand tracks on the player and I generally
used it in "shuffle all" mode. As new firmwares were (occacsionally)
released I kept my JBMM up-to-date although many of the releases created problems
and caused reduced battery life. The most irritating problem I came across
was that the random mode ceased to work, it would play a few random tracks
and then play the same sequence of songs for the next twenty tracks. This
was especially irritating as the JBMM did not come with an inline remote so
to skip track you had to get it out of your bag (previously I had an LG Soul
Digital which cost £300 less than the JBMM but still came with an inline
LCD remote).
As
a photo album the JBMM was fairly poor as it was incredibly slow to copy images
off of memory cards and it took a long time to display them too. This might
be because my camera takes 4 megapixel images so they’re about 1Mb each but
it still means that it’s impractical for anything above a beginners needs.
Also as mentioned above the photo attachments can only read SMC or CF and
as my camera uses SD cards I had to buy a SD to CF adapter to use this feature.
I also bought the DVR (digital video recorder) module when it was finally
released. It was promised that you would be able to use the JBMM just like
a VCR. Did it work? Not really, no. The quality of the recording was way below
acceptable, it was barely watchable on the built in screen and terrible on
anything larger than that. I was very dissapointed by this as the DVR was
one of the main selling points of the jukebox yet it seemed that Archos
must have known they could never have built a decent quality unit. They claimed
it was a limitation of the chip in the JBMM but as they built it they would
have been aware of this at the design stage.
Having not learnt my lesson, when the FM Module was released I bought that
too. As a slight digression it’s worth pointing out that the FM Module was
available in this country (the UK) for £99 or I could buy it from Canada
and get it shipped here for the equivalent of about £25. Considering
Archos are a French company that doesn’t make much sense to me. Anyway back
to the FM Module itself, for the first time it seemed that Archos had actually
employed some designers in their company, it actually looked quite good. It
was a bit boxy but compared to the blocky nature of both the JBMM and all
of the other modules it was a fox. It was also small and light and after plugging
it in the whole thing lit up which suprised me as all the pictures I had seen
of it showed it unlit. The FM Module actually worked quite well, the buttons
were well laid out and responsive. It picked up FM radio suprisingly well
and the retro record function worked as described, in that it started recording
before you pressed the record button so it didn’t matter if you missed the
beginning of a track. The downside of the FM Module was that it seemed to
reduce the already poor battery life further.
Conclusion
The device is a great idea but as the Grolsch advert says "it’s not
ready yet". Eventually after eight months the battery life was dwindiling
to around two and a half hours playback from a twelve hour charge so I took
it back to Dixons. I
got a credit note for £350 and for another £50 I bought a brand
new 40Gb iPod. Perhaps the sixth or seventh generation
iPod will make multimedia jukeboxes a useable product but now I have a laptop
I don’t see any need for a separate portable video player.
NOTE: Sorry for the poor quality of the images but as I don’t have the
unit anymore I can’t reshoot the photos.