Music went portable half a century ago courtesy of the transistor radio and has become more personal and portable over the last 25 years thanks to the Sony Walkman and Discman and then MP3 players. Video is poised to do the same thing with the arrival of the first portable multimedia players, led by the dazzling Archos Video AV320 ($599.95 direct). Now you can watch a video recorded from virtually any source, anywhere.

What is the AV320? Imagine an Apple iPod on steroids, one big enough (4.4 by 3.2 by 1.2 inches, HWD) to hold a color LCD, so you can watch video as well as play audio. The silver case contains a 20GB USB 2.0 hard drive (you can get the 40GB AV340 for $30 more), and the device, which uses a Linux operating system, can record, store, and play back MPEG-4 video, MP3 music, spoken audio, and JPEG photos. At 12 ounces and 17 cubic inches, the AV320 is just under twice as heavy as a 30GB iPod and a little more than twice as bulky. The multimedia player is both dazzling for what it does well and maddening for what it does clumsily.

To record video from an analog source, you clip an included MPEG-4 encoder module to the AV320, attach cables from the source to the encoder, then hit Record on the jukebox and the Play button on your camcorder, VCR, DVD player, or whatever device is supplying the output. Recording occurs in real time and doesn't stop automatically, so if you want to capture Titanic, you need to come back 3 hours 14 minutes later to prevent the AV320 from recording blank video onto your jukebox's hard drive. We recorded half a dozen commercial DVDs at 320-by-240, the screen's resolution, and although all were copy-protected, there was no effect on the analog signal or the picture. You can send the output to a TV set and the picture is still passable—call it VCR quality—even on a display as big as 53 inches, but is noticeably softer than the output from an original DVD. An included PC utility lets you translate AVI files to MPEG-4 before transferring them to the AV320.

Capacity is 40 hours of video, 1,000 hours of MP3s, up to 200,000 digital photos, 20GB of data, or any combination. You can input music, unlike video, without any attachments via the line-in jack, integrated microphone, or digital-input connector. You can also input MP3s up to 192 Kbps, but not WMAs.

Don't fixate on that iPod-with-video mental image, because Archos is simply not in Apple's league when it comes to design. The AV320 is a patchwork of cables and adapter modules. The six shiny control buttons to the right of the display aren't labeled (the functions of three vary according to what you're doing, and the legends are on the screen, but the buttons are vertical, and the legends are horizontal). One control is a slippery chromed joystick, but rather than pressing the middle of it to select something, you press the Power button briefly. There's no hardware volume control, so you'll want to use the supplied headphones with their in-line volume control. The lithium ion battery is integrated, and it will get you through only one movie before it dies. We measured 2 hours 25 minutes of movie playback on our unit before the battery gave out. Even if you reached Archos' claim of four hours of video (or 10 hours of MP3s) on its lithium ion battery pack, you could see only two of your movies before plugging in to recharge.

At minimum, you'll be carrying 1.3 pounds with the AV320 unit, transformer, and protective case. Add all the cables and clip-on modules, and you'll be close to 2 pounds and quite a bit of clutter. That could increase with the arrival of the fascinating $200 3.3-megapixel AVCam 300 still camera/quarter-VGA video camera clip-on module (not available for testing) and modules for off-loading the contents of camera flash memory cards. If the category seems intriguing but you want something for comparison, RCA/Thomson Consumer Electronics was due to ship a competing personal video player, the RD2780, with several of the functions found on the AV320 built in. Expect many other competitors before year's end. If you have to be first with a new technology, you'll be the envy of some of your neighbors with the Archos AV320 or AV340; if you wait, you may find even more sophistication and ease of use.