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DishNetwork PocketDish Portable PVR

May 26, 2005

Echostar — the DishNetwork folks — are to introduce a portable player this summer.

Based on the AV 700 from Archos (who Echostar recently invested in), the device will hum up to a DishNetwork PVR and download content via USB.

The PocketDish will download a full-length movie in less than 10 minutes from an EchoStar DVR, say people who know details of the product. It will feature hard-disk drives with up to 40 gigabytes of storage. That’s far less than a conventional DVR, but is enough to store 180 hours of standard TV content or 25 hours of TV recorded in the ultrasharp, high-definition format.

EchoStar’s PocketDish will be a spinoff of the Archos AV 700, say industry sources. That device uses Linux software and has a 7-inch screen, but isn’t sold in the U.S.

If this truly arrives as a Linux based product, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when the tweaks get ahold of it…

(via Engadget)

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Written by Chuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
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Comments

2 Responses to “DishNetwork PocketDish Portable PVR”

  1. Robert Howells on June 29th, 2005 1:03 pm

    How can I watch wmv files on a portable dvd player. I recently purchased Power Compress for Media Center Edition and the compressed video will not play on my dvd player.

  2. Chuck Lawson on June 29th, 2005 5:10 pm

    Hi Robert;

    I don’t think you’re going to be able to watch WMVs on a portable DVD player, unless the DVD player explicitly has support for WMV — it has to have a decoder (”codec”) on board specificly to decode WMV files. Ditto for DiVX and other formats. DVDs themselves are encoded in MPEG2, so any other format will require specific support.

    I’ve seen some full size players that offer WMV, but I’ve never shopped for portables, so I’m not sure whether any of them offer it or not…

    You might contact the Power Compress folks, and ask them if they can recommend specific players that they know will work.

    - Chuck

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