Archos TV+

There are several ways to watch downloaded video on your TV. You can go the whole hog and spend hundreds on a Media Centre PC, or you can save cash and buy a simple media streamer box instead - which allows you to access shared video and music content on your network and pipe it through to your TV or hi-fi.

Archos' TV+ takes the latter approach but adds a few twists - on demand video content, recording via your satellite set-top box and a built-in 250GB hard disk.These features, and its silver-and-white boxy looks, mark it out as an Apple TV wannabe, and on paper it looks like a contender.

It has a much bigger hard disk, and its outputs are more impressive: HDMI, component inputs and outputs, even a pair of scart sockets for connection to older, non-digital TV sets.

It supports UPnP media sharing over Wi-Fi or ethernet, where the Apple TV is limited to iTunes, and outdoes its white rival in terms of file format support, too. As well as H.264, MPEG-4 and QuickTime formats, you can play back WMV (up to DVD resolution) and even MPEG-2/VOB files, though you do have to buy a couple of plug-ins (at £15 each) for the full set.

Hook it up to your Sky satellite box and it will record TV shows, though the way it does this is clunky - accessing an online EPG for schedule information and then tying up the output on your set-top box while it records. It's hardly ideal. You can use the TV+ to browse the web, though again the necessary Opera-based browser is a paid-for plug-in (£20).

But that's where the favourable comparisons end. The TV+'s principal weakness lies in its interface which, instead of being redesigned from the ground up, looks like a direct port from its current range of portable media players. It might have sounded like a good idea, but what works well on a portable player's touch-sensitive screen turns out to be unwieldy via remote control on a big screen TV.

It also turns out that, despite an HDMI output on the rear, the Archos TV+ is not capable of outputting in high definition.

Its on-demand content portal isn't currently that impressive either. You have to register for each service separately from a PC or notebook - you can't do it from the device itself. And the films available at the time of writing were hardly what you'd call up-to-date. Archos did promise more soon at the launch of the device, so you might want to wait and see before committing your cash.

The price isn't bad, but even here it undermines itself by charging extra for web browsing and MPEG-2 plug-ins, adding an unacceptable £50 to the price. Ultimately, though, it's not the lack of on-demand content, nor the non-HD capable output that does for the Archos TV+. It's the cumbersome nature of the interface and the drawn out, disparate setup procedure.

Author: Jonathan Bray