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 Neuros OSD has CF, SD, MS and USB ports on the front. This way, you can connect a USB key or drive, or a flash card to record. It can record in QVGA and VGA resolutions using different mpeg-4 formats (or more precisely, “parts”), depending on the targeted playback device (e.g. for the PSP, iPod, TV, phones etc). The interesting addition of the Neuros OSD is the IR Blaster which when placed against the IR receiver of cable boxes it can change the channel! So for example, if you schedule the OSD to record “Prison Break” on FOX at 8 PM on Monday, and then record “Heroes” on NBC at 9 PM, the IR Blaster will change the channel on the cable box and so both shows will be recorded. More over, there is a one-click recording option, so you will never miss a thing. We recorded a few shows from our cable box to test the device and also from our DVD player and it Neuros did the job as advertised.

An additional usage of the Neuros OSD is its playback abilities. It can playback everything from Quicktime to FLV, ASF, WMV, mpeg, mpeg4, but we had no luck wtih h.264. The best compatibility was for DivX files that it played back at higher resolutions without sweating much. Additionally, it can playback mp3, wma, ogg vorbis, flac, wav, AAC, and G.726. It is also able to decode bmp, jpeg and gif and function as a picture viewer. The part we really loved was its UPnP support. We used the TwonkyMedia UPnP server to test the Neuros, and stream videos over our local network.

Perhaps the most interesting new feature is YouTube video streaming and also generic audio streaming from the net. Originally, the feature didn’t work great for us, but the guys over at Neuros fixed the network problem and we can now stream videos that are longer than a minute. Still, we do have a few problems, e.g. some videos start showing on TV after a full minute or so (with these videos already on their first minute)! The big plus of running on Linux of course is that you can easily release an SDK and allow for third party applications!
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.
Some more Neuros OSD youtube videos can be found here, although most of them are running firmware versions that sport older UIs.
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
So I’ve read the review and some of their site, but I still have a couple of questions, mostly about integrating the OSD with MythTV. Sorry if the answers are in plain view, but we like to discuss tech anyway, right?
– Can it grab videofiles from an NFS or Samba share? It has a LAN connection, right? This way the OSD could function as a sexy frontend. It’s certainly more attractive than the barebone I use now. The downside is not using the recording capability (unless it can also record to the NFS share, of course), but it’s still not very expensive.
– Could it actually be configured as a slave backend to MythTV?
It reminds me of the squeezebox (with which I’m very happy).
Filip
It can use SMB, yes. I don’t know about NFS and MythTV.
It can mount NFS shares, but not from the GUI. You have to do it manually by telnetting into the box. If you use NFS, I’m sure you’re skilled enough to do it
It also supports SMB shares, straight from the GUI.
You can playback and record to both (assuming permissions are ok on server side, clearly).
As for the MythTV, there’s no explicit support for it right now. Suggestions on new features are always welcome, though.
For that, you can use the Neuros mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/Neuros-DM320Hardware or the forums from the main Neuros site.
I am lusting after a consumer device to replace my clunky, noisy old xbox with XBMC, but I haven’t found one that can completely replace it yet. When I first found out about the OSD I feel in love – an open source company, encouraging people to develop for its little silent streaming box. It is a great product and one I am watching very closely, waiting for it to become what I would refer to as “stable enough to sit under my TV”… I’m not quite sure it has gone through enough UI and software revisions yet to quite replace the quite incredible XBMC
I’m in the same boat. There isn’t too much on the market that can rival a properly configured XBMC setup. I have 2 xboxen for both my TV’s, and both me and the GF just love them. I have tried Proper MCE 2005 boxes, MythTV, borrowed a friends 360, and they are all just missing something. The only downside is that XBMC only does 720p, but for the price, you can’t complain about that too much.
hmmm … but can you record TV / Video / DVD on a XBMC? As far as i understand you can only playback … so the Neuros seems to do more.
I’m anxiously awaiting a FOSS-based set-top box around $200USD with Ethernet, USB, and TV-out that runs a web browser.
A web browser is useless without running HD on a big screen. And if you need that, there’s always the PS3. Even Opera on 480p on the Wii doesn’t have enough resolution to perform adequately.
It’s for an 85-year-old women with poor vision to use gmail with really big fonts on an old 27″ CRT TV. And she doesn’t know how to use a mouse. The most advanced conceivable use case is receiving an email linking to a YouTube clip of her great-grandchildren.
i.e. A WebTV replacement.
I Have my 32″LCD connected via VGA-cable to my desktop computer. Works great, at native resolution 1360×768. A cordless mouse+keyboard, and I can surf web, and watch everything on the harddrives, and command amaroK to play whatever I want. Dont really need and extra “set-top” box, just a graphics-card with dual connectors. (and nvidias binary driver, but thats another topic(using Linux))
Edited 2007-10-26 09:02
Good think you’ve finally noticed it, it’s been selling for a looooong time.
Anyway, a very interesting product, still thinking of purchasing it but I don’t really have the money……….
I have an OSD and I love it!
I mount an NFS partition from my main computer on the OSD for playing movies. Everything runs smoothly. I had a large mythtv box before this and love the ease of use and size. The guys at Neuros are great too.
Is it just me or does the main menu remind you of sony’s menu for the psp and ps3. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut
As Eugenia pointed out in her review, the main feature of the device is to allow users to archive and consolidate all their video content (DVD, VHS tapes, TV shows)in the open MP4 format. Even the very capable Xbox with XBMC, despite a wider playback support, does not offer this unique recording feature.
Also, yes the OSD supports windows shares (SAMBA) and NFS (as kungfooguru mentioned above). Mac users use sharepoints to access their network shares.
I think I’ll wait till they have 1080p, HDMI and S/PDIF covered.