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Linux Hackers Offered Early Access to Next-Gen DVR
An anonymous reader writes "Linux hackers are being given the first crack at beta units and early release versions of a new Linux-powered DVR. The new device, available from Neuros Technology, is able to record MPEG-4 video from many media sources including cable, broadcast TV, and DVDs allowing the user to then transfer that video to portable media players or serve the media over a network. From the article: 'Neuros says "hundreds" of open source community members helped finalize the OSD's design. About two dozen purchased an early hardware prototype earlier this year. Partly to thank the community, and partly as a way of getting the device into the hands of highly critical users early on, Neuros will offer an initial "beta" production run exclusively to hackers.'"
This is almost REALLY cool, but is missing a few big things.
1) video inputs and outputs are analog.. lame, this isn't next gen, this is last gen.
2) no display. Even a one line LCD would go a long way... I don't always want my TV on to play music for example.
I love the business model though, and allowing the community to build things is great. Much like the Squeezebox.
12Mbps USB 2.0 interface
SD/MMC/MemoryStick, Pro, Duo socket
CF socket supporting I/O mode
RS-232 serial console port (also used for controlling tuner boxes)
10/100 Mbps Ethernet
Infrared detector for remote control
Infrared blaster for controlling tuner boxes
NTSC/PAL composite or S-Video input
NTSC/PAL composite video output
What you do with the signal after it comes out of your digital cable box is up to you. Hook up myth or any of the other PVRs you can find out there. You can definitely put one together for less than $750.
Neuros seems like a really intriguing company. I haven't (yet) purchased any of their gear, mostly because I'm currently happy with my third-gen iPod and relatively ancient USB EyeTV tuner, but I like the way they seem to be developing products.
The killer is going to be software, though; if they can't get a cohesive user experience down, the best software in the world isn't worth more than a VCR. With all the digital covergence stuff, interoperability and ease of use are the two main pillars that support everything else. By using open standards and free software, I'm confident they'll have interoperability on the technical side, but I wonder about the ease of use and vertical integration with other parts of the "user stack." (That is, the applications that let the users do particular tasks, like pull a recording from the STB and burn it to a DVD; will there be one integrated app to do that? Or will it require an awkward chain of tools?)
But in general, I think they're on the right track, and it's refreshing to see a company produce a product that honestly looks neat. It's been a while since I've seen that.
Now, if only they made one that would record DTV without dropping it to an analog signal first...an ADC is nice, but it seems a little late. TV is going digital, and I'd love to see an unencumbered recording device that worked there, before the FCC gets in there and starts crippling things.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Actually, the FCC forces your cable company to provide access for 3rd party devices to work on their networks, via the CableCard mandate. Unfortunately for you, the only (non-discontinued) CableCard ready DVR was just released by TiVo, and costs $799.
But how will the MPAA like that Linux hackers can go through and do whatever they want with a video stream? I think they will have a fit. But when has that ever stopped anybody from keeping backup copie(s) :)
And more seriously, has anybody gotten their hands on one?
I think most TiVO units have "IR Blasters" which are little dongles that go over the IR port on your cableco's box, and switch the channel and otherwise control it.
So basically, you "watch" the output from the TiVO on your monitor/television, and do all your programming and stuff. When the TiVO wants to get a particular signal from the cable box, either so you can watch it live or so it can record it, it sends a signal via the IR blaster into the cable box, switching the channel.
I don't know how reliable they are, and the whole thing reeks of 'kludge' to me, but I know some friends that swear by this setup.
Personally, I think it's too bad that nobody thought to mandate some sort of standardized control interface for cable and TV tuners; a serial port on the back of those DTV boxes would make all the IR stuff unnecessary.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Do they make you buy the television and not allow good ole VCR hookup as well?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
This box is an asymmetric multiprocessor with one ARM and one TI DSP, so code has to be partitioned properly to run fast enough. The TI DSP has no free development tools (AFAIK), so most hackers will not be able to work on codecs or anything else in the "data path". Also AFAIK the codecs are not open source anyway. But I can imagine lots of cool uses for this if the complexity can be managed.
What good is a DVR with out a hard drive?
Sure you can USB it @ 12 MBPS I am sure that will work but that is another part to add. What about the CF/MMC card, have you seen the size of a movie in MPEG4 @ 800x600 D1 quality? it is in the range of 2gig an hour.
Include an IDE or SATA drive bay and ill buy one.
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that it didn't have a DVI port. I mean, it's got everything else that it would need to be a really slick product ... except that it's analog only.
... SVideo? I mean, hello, 1986 calling. What's the purpose of that, so I can connect it to my SVHS deck? How about my Laserdisc player?
So really it's just a glorified 480i ADC with a network card and a USB port. I'm somewhat unimpressed. The card reader slots really don't add anything for me, either. Except as storage for the machine itself, I can't ever foresee myself using them.
But
As I said in another comment, I find Neuros very intriguing as a company, and I hope that they sell enough of these things to stay afloat and make a better model that will do digital recording, preferably soon, before the media companies and their lackeys at the FCC push through a Broadcast Flag.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Who of you really does have a 1080p 64" double wide screen plasma lcd television with HDCP and HDMI functionality? Anyone? No. DVD and analog are doing fine for most mainstream applications. HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are nice as an expensive temporary backup solution and for some nimwits that don't know any better. People just bought into the whole "flat-screen-is-better-hype" replacing their 2-10y old color tv. I think that major expense this and last year ($700-$2000) is going to have to hold up for at least 3-5 years before mothers-and-wifes or just hard-working honest people are going to allow another expense that big because now everything is digital.
This product is aimed (by price ($150)) to the cheap nerd and his family who move their tv around in the house. The living room now has a nice and shiny LCD while the basement (or wherever you Slashdotters live) has the 25" flat-CRT and the bedrooms have the 20" standard CRT in most households.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Partly to thank the community, and partly as a way of getting the device into the hands of highly critical users early on, Neuros will offer an initial "beta" production run exclusively to hackers
Bzzzt, I'll take "corporate PR lines" for $500, Alex.
This is to:
This is a calculated PR move first and foremost; anything a corporation does is motivated almost exclusively in self-interest (more appropriately, the interests of the shareholders.) Anything about "thanking the community" is a secondary (or lower) concern. If they wanted to thank the community, they'd fold back bug fixes, feature additions, and technical innovation into the open-source software they are (no doubt) using.
Please help metamoderate.
Detailed specifications can be found here http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/index.php/Neuros_ OSD
I'm in the market for a High Defintiton media recorder / player. I want to be able to capture an ATSC broadcast stream and record it to hard drive and later to DVD in MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 format and play it back to my high definition monitor.
This product is about 10 years behind the marketplace because it only supports NTSC and PAL.
At ThinkGeek (apparently exclusively)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Is it just me, or is this pretty much what Apple's upcoming iTV will be? The hardware sounds like it's pretty similar.
Useful mostly for streaming low-to-medium resolution video from PC to computer. Neuros adds the ability to record - maybe useful to an attached MP3/video player? (I guess you could NFS-mount a filesystem from elsewhere...?) In practice, I'd bet that's too much of a hassle to be worth the trouble.
So, the specs are nice, and the price isn't bad, and I even have an external hard disk I could slap onto it right now.
I'm not buying it because nowhere in any of the material about it does it say it uses program guide information to manage recordings. After years of Tivo and MythTV, I'm used to not having to know when any show is on or what channel it's on. (When my Tivo died of old age, I was just helpless with the TV until I got my MythTV box running.) I'm not going to give up my MythTV box until I know the replacement is going to be able to schedule recordings based on nothing more than the name of the show. That means it has to have a schedule. That means it has to obtain a schedule. That means I have to know where it's going to obtain its schedule from, so I know if I will have to pay for it, and if so how much. (I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount, I didn't switch to MythTV from Tivo because it's free, I switched because it has better features.)
I would like to switch to a device like this from my MythTV box. It would take up less space, it would be quieter, it might even save on my electric bill, and it would free up the computer I dedicated to MythTV for other purposes. (Like playing Spore when that comes out.) However, this device just doesn't seem like it's quite ready to really call itself a "PVR" yet. It sounds like it's just another video recorder that happens to use digital media.
Oh, and while it's fine for me that it doesn't have an internal hard disk, Neuros should at least sell it with the option of coming with one, even if it's external. I know it's silly, but some people won't buy it unless they can know that they can get it with the disk and that the disk they get is manufacturer tested and approved.
If USB at 12 MBPS isn't fast enough for you, how about full-duplex 100bT? Choose your network file system and away you go... if you don't want the traffic on your main switch, spring an extra $10 for another port on the NAS and use a Cat-5 crossover wire.
I would't want drives on a box like the Neuros, personally; I keep my drives in a big ol' RAID array in my nice cool basement instead of pumping out extra heat in my A/V center.
I have two big stacks of "set-top-boxes" and other A/V related equipment, and I would appreciate it when manufacturers, even if they do not want to stick to 17" cabinets, at least put their products into square boxes that allow some stacking.
When everyone starts to use cases like this, space below my TV runs out very quickly...
Dude, stop looking at the trees — you're in the wrong forest. This device not only lacks an internal hard disk, its resolution choices are way below what you'd need to capture HD streams. Component outputs would be like tailfins on a Honda.
Judging from their web site, Neuros is mainly interested in creating devices that use portable devices for playback. Hence the emphasis on flash memory for storage. When this product goes GA, I'll certainly consider buying one to use with my TV — but my TV is not only analog, it has maybe a 10-inch screen. This DVR is aimed at people like me, with shallow pockets and modest requirements, not high-end video lovers like you.
Both Svartalf (2997) and markwalling (863035) mention it, but, to re-iterate, this product is being offered exclusively through Thinkgeek.
It seems slightly disingenuous to post a story from another website, http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4532837874.html , about the Neuros OSD DVR without mentioning that Thinkgeek and Slashdot are owned by the same company and that Thinkgeek is the sole distributor for now.
A quick disclaimer would be probably be appropriate in the future.
I have one of the first Neuros Audio MP3 players and was promised a USB 2.0 upgrade as soon as the spec was finished and access to the loading software and the firmware as open source code.
As far as the USB 2.0, I was supposed to know that when they offered an ALPHA version (not BETA, ALPHA) of the USB 2.0 dock online that I was supposed to jump on it. No e-mails, no notification, I was just supposed to know somehow that the ALPHA version was my free upgrade. As soon as the USB 2.0 dock was finalized, I called them up and asked for one, since I bought it during the appropriate time period. They responded that I missed my window to upgrade for free. I responded that when I bought the player, they didn't say they were going to give me an ALPHA USB 2.0 dock, the implication was that I would get a fully-tested one. Eventually, they agreed to ship me one for a very reduced price. It never worked. I was finally refunded minus 2-way shipping (over $50 on a $250 player).
They NEVER provided the firmware as open-source code even though that was prominently displayed when I bought it. Their excuse? "It takes a $50,000 piece of hardware to compile it and nobody will be able to do anything with it." Several of us responded that there are some REALLY smart people in the world that make emulators and stuff and you might be amazed. Just put it out there. Still waiting.
They finally did release the C#.NET source code of the loading program, but that thing was so slow it would take 14-16 hours to load up a 20GB player. It would lock up for about 6-7 hours with no status just when you dropped your MP3 folder on the window, but it would eventually finish. After that, it would take about 8-10 hours to load up the player over USB 1.1.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that they did add several nice features to the player including an equalizer, all in firmware updates. So they did support it some, but not in a way that was usable for me (or promised to me).
Bottom line: beware of this vendor and their promises.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that it didn't have a DVI port. I mean, it's got everything else that it would need to be a really slick product ... except that it's analog only.
Erm, outputing analog video source over DVI is completely pointless. Cudos to the company for not making it twice as expensive to give people an ILLUSION of quality while actually making it look worse.
So really it's just a glorified 480i ADC with a network card and a USB port.
Exactly. Except it also has a low power CPU capable of running its own code. Pretty much we are looking at AV equivalent of a linksys wi-fi router. Only unlike cisco they are encouraging people to write their own code.
I'm somewhat unimpressed. The card reader slots really don't add anything for me, either. Except as storage for the machine itself, I can't ever foresee myself using them.
The roots of this device is in capturing analog video into MPEG-4 for viewing on portable devices... you know, like the ones that READ flash media. The card slots ARE EXACTLY for storage for the machine.
Given the cost of this device ($230) what they packed in there is pretty impressive.
-Em
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