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Lyra puts video in your hand
By Sean Carruthers, posted 4/2/2004 4:17:14 PM

Though a number of Windows Media-compatible portable video players were announced at January's Consumer Electronics Show, those products aren't the first portable video players to hit the market. There are already a few available -- albeit without the Windows-style interface -- including the Lyra Audio/Video Jukebox, from RCA.

The sleek Jukebox is slightly bigger than many of the hard drive-based digital audio players we've seen and comes with a 3.5-inch colour screen for displaying photos and video files. This display doubles as your menu system, allowing you to scroll through your list of files, which is especially handy if you've stored hundreds of digital audio files on the Jukebox. The menu system looks pretty good but has a few quirks, notably the circle-slash "not available" icon that pops up whenever you try to press the menu button during playback of a video, but which goes away when you hold it in for a few seconds.

More problematic is the Audio/Video Jukebox's ability to handle video files. The player is supposed to play MPEG-4 and MPEG-1 files, but only those encoded in certain formats -- most of our sample files would not play on the Jukebox. It also handles Windows Media Audio files but not Windows Media Video -- which the new Windows Media players will handle. The upshot is that though the Jukebox will play video, it's a very limited subset of the video files available. That's largely because of the wide variety of codecs available for different files with the same file type, which makes it nearly impossible to handle everything; still, a wider variety would have been nice.

On the audio side, the Jukebox handles both WMA
and MP3/MP3 Pro files, which means most of your digital audio should be compatible. The Jukebox also handles JPEG files without complaint, but not other
image formats.

It has a built-in 20 GB hard drive and data is transferred using a USB 2.0 connection. The nice thing about the Audio/Video Jukebox is that you can move your files to the player using the standard Windows interface. Windows treats the player as if it was an external hard drive; even though MusicMatch software is included for managing your music, it's not required to get the music over to the player. And, because Windows sees the Jukebox as an external drive, you can copy and move any files you want, including text documents, data files, and more. You can even copy files to the player from the built-in CompactFlash Type I slot.

One major advantage the Audio/Video Jukebox has over the forthcoming Windows-based players is the ability to record audio and video. The player ships with a special cable that can be attached to composite video and stereo audio outputs from a TV or component (using, fittingly, RCA connectors), and gives you the option to record for a specified time, perfect for recording one program without having to wait around to press "stop." The good news about having the recording capability onboard is that you can just convert your old videotapes by recording them straight into the Lyra instead of having to convert them on the PC and hope they work. It also makes it easy to catch up on your TV while you're on the subway heading for work. There can be a delay after pressing the "record" icon, which means the recording start/stop points aren't as clean as they could be.

The video issues with the Lyra Audio/Video Jukebox are what will make or break it in the eyes of potential purchasers. Those who only want to play back video but want wider video compatibility may want to wait for the release of the Windows-based players. Those who are more interested in recording their own video files will want to jump on this one.