Since the integration of video into Apple's iPod range, the market has never been bigger for portable video players. While some of the competition in the market has been established since long before Apple made the move towards offering video content, other established manufacturers have made the jump to video by now as well.

With that in mind we decided to take a look at the Archos Gmini 500 and iRiver's U10.

Archos Gmini 500

Archos has been playing the portable video game longer than many of its current rivals, offering high capacity, hard-disk based players nearly without competition for a long time. The Gmini 500 is a continuation along the same lines as earlier Archos portable video players. As usual, its strongest feature is its 4" screen, sporting 262,000 colors; the 480x272 pixel resolution provides a sharper picture than expected on so large a screen. This is backed up by its 40 GB of storage, which is enough space to allow a user's favorite files to take up permanent residence on the player without making too noticeable a dent.

The Archos Gmini 500, sadly not waterproof.

Files are transferred through a standard USB-to-USB cable (provided); while most music files will transfer without issue, the Gmini 500 can and most likely will take issue with most (if not all) video files transferred to it directly by drag and drop. Instead, videos can be pushed to the player using Windows Media Player (WMP), though there are still occasional videos that won't play. While the need for transfer via WMP is something of a hurdle, it is by no means the Gmini 500's biggest issue; we'll talk about that later.

When using WMP for file transfers the Gmini easily played AVI, MPG and WMV formatted videos. In contrast, the player seems to have trouble with DivX playback, with Archos stating that it "may not read all DivX 4.0 & 5.0 files" and it "does not read DivX 3.11 & 6.0 files". Fortunately, these encodes seemed rare enough that we encountered little difficulty with a variety of digital movie backups.

The Gmini 500 is practically unparalleled in the realm of video playback. With a screen bright enough to allow viewing outdoors and sharp enough to fully enjoy all content, additional features are just icing on the cake. Particularly useful is the option to place a "bookmark" in videos, allowing resumption of movie playback from where the player last stopped. It might not seem important, but it kills the need for endless backtracking that plagues so many portables.