posted by Eugenia Loli on Fri 26th Oct 2007 06:01 UTC
Neuros Technology did it again: one more of their interesting media products hits the market, and this time it uses Linux. We used the Neuros OSD this past week and here's what we think about it.At its heart, the Neuros OSD is a TV recorder. It has a small form factor, and it's by far the sexiest product Neuros released so far. It comes with a stand, an RCA cable, a remote control, an IR Blaster, and a power cable. Connecting it to various devices is an easy task. You can choose between S-Video in or RCA in, and RCA out. Unfortunately, there is no S-Video out. The company said that "our team noticed a very minimal gain in quality of the video output when using S-video instead of Composite during their tests", although this is hard to believe when you playback full NTSC .avi files rather than recorded QVGA ones. More over, on the device you will find an ethernet port for LAN support, and a serial/VGA port for debugging and development.
The UI is not too bad, but it could be better. Some bugs exist and in a few cases we had to remove the power cable to reset the device. Also, I am somehow not able to put the device in standby using the "PWR" button on the remote control. Thankfully, new firmware versions are regularly released. I think that a picture is worth 1000 words, but possibly a video can worth 100,000. So, here's our video showing off the user interface and various options available.
Overall, Neuros seems to get it. Extensibility, plus a powerful product. Hopefully HD abilities and failing that, S-Video out, will be available on the next major revision of the product. Sure, it doesn't feel as cool as an AppleTV, but it does so much more!
Rating: 8/10
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