Lacie's LaCinema Rugged is an attempt to stylise the media jukebox and was designed for the company by the 'world-famous' industrial designer Neil Poulton. It's certainly a tidy looking device whose distinguishing feature is a removable black rubberised skin surrounding a black plastic case housing the hard drive.

One side of the case is exposed to reveal an HDMI port, optical connector for digital audio and a composite video and stereo audio connection. All of the cables needed, including HDMI, are supplied in the box along with a basic remote control and backup and restore software so that you can use the device as a portable hard drive.

Primarily you'll be copying video, music and photo content onto the device, which is a simple case of drag and drop. When connected to a TV the LaCinema splits files into each of these categories to browse and play back.

There's subtitle support for video, basic slideshow control for photos and shuffle and repeat settings for audio, but in truth this is about the extent of the options available to customise playback. The interface is also extremely basic: in most cases menus are shown in black and white with crude icons used to illustrate filetypes. It's not a nice approach from Lacie but would be forgivable if the rest of the features worked like a charm. Sadly this is not the case.

Format support appears to be good on paper with MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 for video, MP3, WMA, AC3 and OGG for audio and JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP for photos. In practice we had some issues with video file support which in most instances was traceable back to the type and quality of audio codec used. This didn't occur often enough to ruin the experience, but unfortunately other factors threaten to undermine this unit's capabilities as a media jukebox.

Tracking back and forth through video files is awkward as no timeline is shown on screen and the picture becomes completely distorted during the process, which makes it difficult to find a specific place in a file. The device was also subject to numerous crashes when browsing back and forth which required a restart, and despite the fact that video quality is pretty good it's not an acceptable situation to have to deal with.

There's really not a lot to the LaCinema Rugged, which makes the fact that it doesn't get the basics right even more of an problem. It certainly looks good, but the tidy, portable design doesn't nearly make up for operational issues that make it an extremely frustrating device to use.

Verdict
The LaCinema Rugged is overly basic, suffers from numerous operational problems and doesn't offer a great degree of media control. It also crashed and froze-up a number of times during testing and, despite the nice design, we have to say that this is one home cinema accessory that's best avoided.

Company: LaCie

Tags: neil poulton windows media audio universal serial bus hdmi digital video lacie moving picture experts group multimedia