Rating: 
Summary: Actually, its a 4.5 or maybe a 4.7
Review: Now that the new firmware has dropped, many of the issues have been worked out. For the money and for the abilities the Lyra A/V has it is a tremendous piece of machinery. Taking all the factors in the Lyra far outpaces the cheap looking model put out Archos, it's only competitor. I imagine other manufacturers will soon follow of course. I would definitely recommend the Lyra to anyone and everyone without hesitation now with the new firmware in place. Only the lack of communication from RCA themselves is slightly disappointing. I find it interesting that this Amazon message board yields more information about the Lyra than the RCA site itself. But I guess that's spilt milk. My only hopes would be to see the operating system move faster between functions, more Mac compatibility (as far as the installation discs are concerned) and more codecs for movies. But again, if you were weighing all your options, the Lyra kills any other portable on the scene to date. Good stuff!
Rating:
Summary: They made it...
Review: Guess what people. On April 3, 2004, RCA came out with a new firmware upgrade (Ver. 17.9) for its RD2780 A/V Jukebox. It is the best yet!!
I was really disappointed when I just bought this device and noticed all the features it had but were not available yet. Finally yesterday, I went to their website and there it was..,, the new firmware upgrade, Even though it doesn't have completely all of the features ready to use, it has a lot of stuff that I personally was dying to try and now I will!!!Some of the enhancements are: *Audio Graphic EQ enabled! Choose from 21 unique settings as well as a customizable 5 band graphic equalizer. *Video Book marking enabled! Bookmark and restore up to 10 separate time-indexed locations from each movie on your Lyra™ AV. *Smart Tagging and Playlist Creation Enabled! By using the plus and minus keys, songs, photos and videos can be tagged for creation of and adding to "playlists" for each media type. *Video Indexing Feature Enabled! When the menu button is depressed during Video playback, a NEW video banner is presented with +/- 30 second and +/- 15-minute fast forward and fast rewind (small and large arrows). *PAL Recording Frame rate Bug has been fixed! So do yourselves a favor and download this last firmware version and start getting the best out of your Lyra RD2780 A/V Jukeboxes!!
Rating: 
Summary: Avoid this product until Version 3 or 4
Review: Good points:
For such a small screen, it looks good.
Easy to carry around.
It does a good job of saving and retrieving computer files. Needs work:
Software just plain stinks. This has to be the worst software written since the Commodore 64. First, the "Saving settings to hard disk" - what a waste of time. Let us turn this feature off. I use a bunch of 2 minute videos and after I view a 2 minute video, I have to wait 45 seconds while it "Saves settings to hard disk". Extremely annoying and no way to turn it off. And, on MP3s, specifically books on tape, where you WOULD like to bookmark the spot you left off, the feature is not available. On MP3s, they require you to "Profile" your MP3s, whatever that means. It takes a good 10 minutes to profile your MP3s, and every time you add another album, you have to re-profile. I have owned 6 MP3 Players, and NEVER have had to anything like that. As near as I can tell, there is NO advantage to doing a profile. It also would have been a better idea to use batteries vs. this rechargeable lithium-ion deal, that, like the iPod, will burn out and then you have nothing. With regular batteries you can use rechargeables, and if the batteries happen to run down and you don't have time to recharge, you can just run into a store and buy batteries. RCA used to make a lot of money selling rechargeable batteries. Are they out of that business now?
Rating: 
Summary: Very cool! But not perfect.
Review: First of all, let me just say that I love my Lyra! Simply put: It does pretty much exactly what I'd hoped, and more. I can EASILY rip my DVD's to the device (Thanks to a clever technique discovered by another user) and copying files to the device from my PC is a snap. Playback quality of Video and Audio is remarkable! That's what I wanted from the device, and it delivers in spades.
Now let me caution you however. This is no Ipod! If ease of use is a critical factor for you, and you don't care about video, don't buy the Lyra. Buy the Ipod, because it's interface is without equal. The Lyra interface, while a good start, is slower, less intuitive, and incomplete. Once you putter with it for an hour or 2, you can get around these issues, but I am still eagerly awaiting the addition of such features as equilizer functions, and managing playlists (Yes, you can port in your MusicMatch playlists, but it will be so much easier built in. BTW, I had a chance to play with the Archos jukebox for a short time. Personal opinion: Archos suffers from poor interface in similar ways to the Lyra. Some features better, some worse. Plus, I prefer the design of the Lyra, as well as the protective case. So, to sum up: Do your homework! Be sure an A/V jukebox is really what you want before you invest. The Lyra is certainly proced competitively with the Ipod, or Archos, but you must be prepared to take the good with the bad.
Rating:
Summary: Dead air in "Shuffle all" mode
Review: Just purchased this product. Tryed to get a solution to my problem from the RCA "service" dept. They acted like they didn't know what I was talking about and told me to send it back to them!
In a nutshell- Quite often in the "shuffle all" mode there is a pause of up to a minute between songs! I would like the next song to start instantly after the prior song ends. Can this be fixed?
Rating: 
Summary: Not ready for prime time
Review: Like the story of the talking dog that no one could understand but that amazed everyone because it could talk at all, the Lyra AV Jukebox has amazing capabilities, but it doesn't do anything particularly well. A few examples: * It supports MP3 and WMA audio formats, but doesn't support Windows Media files with any kind of digital rights management, meaning that files purchased from services like Napster have to be burned to audio CDs, then ripped back into WMA or MP3 format, and finally, copied to the Lyra AV Jukebox.
* Copying a large library of audio files to the LYRA is S-L-O-W. Using the (included) MusicMatch software, it takes hours to transfer my approx. 4GB library to the Lyra, vs. 10-15 minutes to copy the same library to my Rio Karma using the Rio Music Manager.
* Many, many features are still unimplemented, five months after I purchased the Lyra; attempting to use them will get an error message that says, in essence, "Try again later when we release new firmware."
* Transferring video to the Lyra requires extensive trial and error, and no software to do so is bundled with the player by RCA. I've had good success with a combination of DVD Shrink (freeware) and Dr. DivX (paid software) with custom settings. In short, I'd recommend that you wait for RCA to implement all the features that were supposed to be in the product from the beginning and fix the product's performance problems (which, at this point, may never happen,) buy the Archos (which also has problems but nowhere near as many as the RCA,) or wait for players that use Microsoft's portable Media Player software later this year.
Rating:
Summary: Good Value
Review: This product is actually really good. I did a lot of comparison shopping between this and the Archos model, and although the Archos model is superior it is also made cheaper, with cheap plastic, and is from $150-200 more than the RCA Lyra. So I opened up my Lyra and tested it out, and I played the sample audio, videos, and pictures and it look great. The operating system was very slow and clunky though, and a lot of the features didn't work yet. I went online to the RCA Lyra site and I downloaded and installed the Feb. firmware and that helped a lot, because it included all the fixes from previous versions of the fimrware as well as many new ones. The speed of the OS is better now, although it's still not perfect. Flasing the firmware was easy, as ripping the cds with musicmatch and getting them onto the device, and recording or viewing the device on the TV was a snap. You need to encode your videos into DiVX to play them on the Lyra but just download Dr. Divx and it's a snap. I downloaded a bunch and it worked fine. The thing that's great about the Lyra is that it can only get better. The new firmware will come out and fix even more stuff and add a bunch of extra features. Also all the accesories are nice as well as the case. Right now the Archos model is better, but this one is cheaper, and once the firmware bring it up to date, it will be just as good, if not better than the Archos, and at a better value. As for video I got it to play for 3 and a half hours until the machine died, with the LCD brightness at default(half). I set the backlight timer at 5 seconds, and played audio and got a good 8 hours out of it, so maybe its just the new firmware but it works fine. I'm glad I purchased this model after this new firmware release though, because it made the device a lot better, and I can imagine the headaches that it gave users when it first came out with the 1st firmware. You have to have basic computer skills to get this running though, because you need some extra programs to get around encoding and stuff, but it was easy for me. I just think RCA should have had all the features working before they released this though, and give a little bit better support. Overall this was a good purchase for a good value.
Rating:
Summary: RCA has a winner with this
Review: I bought this unit with some concern as the reviews were a little mixed. After a month I can say that it is one of the best gadgets I have ever owned, including the iPod. Used on its own, it makes PERFECT videos off a cable box or VCR. I used it on a recent trip to London with 25 kid's videos recorded. Whether used on its own (as on a plane) or plugged in to a TV, the replay was excellent with good sound. Reviews said there was macroblocking and other artifacts -- perhaps with the old software, I have seen almost none.
MP3 playback is on a par with the iPod but with greater loudness available. In sum, in one little device I can hold my entire family photo album, a few thousand songs and over a dozen movies. It is worth more than what I paid for it. Highly, highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Use only for recording soap operas, I guess
Review: I have a specific use for this item and it involves video that I have downloaded off the internet (legal download) After jumping through hoops and trying everything, I discovered by trial and error and some nice analysis software from GSpot.com, that, if you use EO video conversion software and install the DivX 5.1.1 codecs and use the MP3 audio codec, you can make the video work on the Lyra. It's the only conversion software that I have found that works (and I tried a half dozen). The problem with EO is that it doesn't correct for the audio shift so the audio is a second or 2 ahead of the video. This is not a problem for me, but it probably is for everybody else. BTW, if you don't use the right codecs and try your video on the Lyra, it locks up and you have to use a paper clip to reset it. Recording off TV is easy, but don't expect to be able to record movies or DVDs - there is a protection scheme and it doesn't record. I haven't tried MP3s - I didn't buy this to use as an MP3 player - it's too big and it costs too much for that. I did transfer some .jpg pictures over to the Lyra. Only about half of them showed up. The rest said "format not supported", which is wacky, because I created the .jpgs in Photoshop 6.0, which I always thought was pretty standard software. There isn't (currently) any way to adjust brightness or contrast on your videos, so everything I uploaded to the Lyra looks washed out. I can correct that. Overall, this is not ready for Prime Time. It's looks like they are updating software, but right now, forget it. If you want to upload the soaps or some other TV shows, it is very easy to do. But for computer stuff, it's not worth it. BTW, it's a dinky little picture, but I expected that. Others may be disappointed. One other thing. Right now there is no way to shut of the "saving settings to hard drive" which happens if you turn a video off in mid-play. It takes forever to save those settings. This is a feature that needs to be turned off. I need to be able to get out of a video and into another video a lot faster than that.
Rating:
Summary: Piece of Junk
Review: Very simple. This unit is supposed to record video from an
outside source. Somethimes it does, sometimes it just shuts
itself off.
RCA won't do anything about it and just ignores me. I'm buying
the Archos.
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