RCA Lyra
Encyclopedia
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
.
RD2201A
The device also supports much larger CF cards than it original shipped with, up to at least 512MB. At these sizes though, boot time becomes significantly long, as the Lyra scans the entire card before presenting you with any menu. With only 250MB of files, spread across roughly 100 tracks, this can be over a minute.
The 2201 also supports custom splash screens via third party software. The RCA logo can be replaced by overwriting the screen.bit file in the Pmp folder. See How To Create Lyra Screen BIT Designs for more information.
An updated version, the RD2204A, was sold with a 64MB Compact Flash card. This version supports Compact flash cards up to at least 2GB. Like the RD2201A, boot times increase with the size of the card. The RD2204A can also be used with a third party CF reader, provided that the user installs the RCA software on the PC.
Lyra PDP-2860
The most popular of the Lyra series was the Lyra PDP-2860, which was also one of the first portable media playerPortable media player
A portable media player or digital audio player, is a consumer electronics device that is capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, video, documents, etc. the data is typically stored on a hard drive, microdrive, or flash memory. In contrast, analog portable audio...
s capable of playing MPEG-4 encoded videos. The PDP-2860 is remarkably similar to the Lyra RD2780. The device was manufactured having a hard drive with a maximum capacity of 20GB but could also work with a 60GB hard drive which had to be installed manually. Battery life was reported to last for up to 3 hours of video and 6 hours of audio playback.
One of the more popular features of this digital audio player was its ability to record live television through the RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
ports on your television set. The player's LCD display had a resolution of 320×240 pixels with 16 million colors. It was also possible to view photos on the display screen while audio was playing.
PDP-2860
The PDP-2860 was also UMS-capableUSB mass storage device class
The USB mass storage device class, otherwise known as USB MSC or UMS, is a protocol that allows a Universal Serial Bus device to become accessible to a host computing device, to enable file transfers between the two...
, meaning that it could act as a portable external harddrive with no additional software or driver installation.
x2400
The Lyra x2400 is a portable audio/video recorder and player with a 3.5" LCD screen. It has a CompactFlashCompactFlash
CompactFlash is a mass storage device format used in portable electronic devices. Most CompactFlash devices contain flash memory in a standardized enclosure. The format was first specified and produced by SanDisk in 1994...
slot, audio out, built-in speaker and RCA A/V inputs. Recorded video is compressed with an XVID encoder. The included software, Blaze Media Encoder, can transcode from most popular video and audio formats.
x3030
The Lyra x3030 features a 30 GB hard drive with support for many audio and video formats. Included is a DIVX encoder which can translate most video formats into smaller more efficient formats.Issues
There is no provision to randomly play video clips, as the user may wish to do for a music video jukebox.The DiVX converter gives its output file with the .divx extension, which the Lyra rejects as incompatible. However, all the user has to do is rename the file with a .avi extension to make it work.
The first documentation to be shipped spoke of a system tray resident icon and program to manage the device. No such software exists in the distribution, and they have since revised their documentation to remove all mention of it.