So after a small amount of bribery and a trade of a laptop for the weekend we got our paws on the BNI Joycoder. BNI or Blue Nova International are specialists in the multimedia gadgets and sourcing the best from outside the UK and Europe before applying the Blue Nova brand.

The PV-380 goes under the Joycoder brand and this model is a 40gb hard disk based pocket PVR or portable video recorder, the 3.5" screen is the best feature of the 380 with a good colour representation and light output, the model on test here does not have the stereo speakers of the 380-2 model so instead audio is though a set of supplied stereo headphones.

The Joycoder is built around an embedded Real One player, this gives a clean and simple user interface similar to real's online look and feel, anyone who has used real one player will find this instantly familiar. The use of Real does however immediately raise the issue of file format compatibility, we always want to push files to a PMP for playback and BNI's marketing is very clearly pitched at recording from the TV or from a DVD player.

This is all for good reason as the file format support is very limited, Mpeg 4 is its favoured native file format and of course RM (Real Media files) the MPEG 4 codec supports a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels at a frame rate of between 25 - 28fps. Which is all a little strange given the 480 x 234 screen size from the 3.5" LCD, the next strange thing is that there are no real tools provided for the manual recording, sure you can hook it to your TV but you'll have to sit until Eastenders starts and push then button, in which case you could just watch it!

The failure to integrate is not unique to the BNI Joycoder, we've seen this on every PMP we've tested to date, so we'll discount this as being a major failing and move onto making some recordings from DVD for a quality assessment.

After hooking up the DVD player to the PV-380 we made a MPEG 4 recording, judging by the size of this 1 hour file we could get about 40hours on the device, playback of the encoded file was smooth and jitter free if slightly unimpressive, the resolution is not great even on the 3.5" screen and the image did seem quite soft.

The Real One software also allows for MP3 playback and the 40gb drive means some 12,000 tracks stored, the user interface for the MP3 playback is good and the colour screen makes it a joy to use, at 300 grams however it is a fairly heavy MP3 player. It is possible to download pictures (Jpeg's) to the BNI Joycoder PV-380 through the USB 2.0 interface, these are then viewed as thumbnail and full screen, building a  slide show is easy enough but we've seen this before on the Archos Gmini 400.

Then we get to the area where the money has been saved, the battery will give a little over 3 hours video playback or just under 10hrs audio only operations. In comparison we've seen 6 hours video playback from other more expensive PMP's and an Ipod manages 10hrs audio playback and it is now seen as the minimum you can expect.

So we get to the BNI Joycoder budget image, at £300 it seems well priced, but Archos older models are now falling in price and nearing this level and the Gmini 400 is down at £249, although its not an out and out PMP its not far off the functions of the PV-380.

Overall the choice of a Real One interface is a strange one although not entirely unsuccessful, however it is picky on file formats and the recording is simplistic at best, this model lacks any speakers and its not actually that cheap. While portable media players are in their infancy there may be room for BNI and the Joycoder but they will have to do better than this.

More PMP's -

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