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Neuros OSD Review
An anonymous reader writes "The Neuros OSD promises a lot — it claims to be the first open source Linux-based embedded media center and it "records video and links your PC, portables and entertainment center". Bold claims, but can it live up to them? Linuxlookup.com has a two page review of the Neuros OSD."
I've really been thinking about getting one of these. I currently use the Xbox, mod'd to run XBMC. If the neuros can work that well out of the box (preferably running a port of XBMC) then I'd be sold. As I see it now it's still too much work compared to the Xbox solution.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
According to TFA, this does not yet support 16:9 aspect ratio. Presumably that also means it doesn't support HD content. I wasn't clear if this is supposed to be a new DVR solution, but if so, then it needs to support HD and 16:9 before I'd consider it.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
I RTFA and noticed the following snippet;
I have quite a large TV - a 37" widescreen - and the playback on that screen was quite poor. Whether this was related to the widescreen issues mentioned below or the general quality of my input source I'm not sure, but I certainly won't be using the OSD to record TV for playback on my TV.
I'm not sure I can justify spending money on something that'll record stuff that only looks good on the PC or a portable player... if I wanted that I'd just use my PC's inbuilt functionality. Still, a good start.
What the hell is this thing? A Tivo without a hard drive? Do I hook it to my TV or my computer? Or both (via ethernet.)
No sig for you!!
I thought you were going on a scale of "Ouch!", "Wow", or "Boinnnnnnnnng!" Somebody's been watching too many old Christmas movies. I guess it's me.
At $230, it doesn't look like it's breaking the bank for a DVR...until you realize that it doesn't include a hard disk! It also doesn't record HD video. At that price, it seems like it should do one or the other.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
The Neuros OSD is small. Very small. At only 14cm wide, 14cm deep and 3.2cm high, it fits comfortably in just about any hole you'd care to stow it.
Oh my!
I'm trying SO hard not to post a link to a certain hole.
I guess I only half read it the first time. That's what I get for reading /., writing PHP and being on a conference call at the same time.
No sig for you!!
And then you'll have something. As it is now it's not terribly useful.
Widescreen? Nope. HDTV? Nope. Dual tuners? Doesn't look like it. Display on front to show what it's recording? Nope. Support for digital cable (cable card)? Nope. Downloadable programs over the 'net? Nope. Suggestions based on other users TV viewing? Nope. "Season Pass" like recording? Doesn't seem like it. Fits nicely in a rack of home theater equipment (doesn't look like a PC)? Nope. Ability to hack? Yes. Monthly fee? No.
Let's compare that to a TiVo series 3.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, soon, yes, yes, yes, no, yes.
It only won in the last two categories.
Yeah, I'll drop my Series 3 for this thing. Heck, I wouldn't drop a Series 2. You can hack a Series 2 to add other stuff, and still have the great TiVo UI and service.
I've yet to see what I consider to be even a mildly compelling alternative to a TiVo. Unless you have all the parts sitting around and want to build a MythTV box for free, they just aren't there. I mean, why should I choose this over a cable company DVR which would give me things like On Demand and HD?
TiVo: Still #1, no serious competitors since the death of ReplayTV.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is so obsolete, it's fascinating, just like the stories of people who rent phones from 1970 and people who still send telegrams. If someone just now introduced something this obsolete, it makes you wonder how many people are still selling Commodore VIC-20's as new technology.
I had an OSD for a couple weeks and returned it. I'm an embedded Linux developer by trade, so it would have been right in my wheelhouse, IF I had a ton of free time to work on it and time to wait for Neuros' and others' contributions. But seriously, you can't call it beta if > 50% of the features on the box don't work reliably. It's not fair to review the unit at this time. It's nowhere near done.
I've been using a Roku HD-1000 for several years to playback HD content. Its kind of the same idea as this thing, but why didn't these guys add support for HD? The roku is diskless also (completely fanless/motorless too, so completely quiet), so it is very nice for home theatre. Just plug via ethernet to a box with a drive and a tuner card to record stuff. Oh, Roku is also linux based and programmable.
TFA mentions that the little box requires some non-free kernel modules. Doesn't shipping this violate the GPL?
I bought one, and its a piece of shit. It can't display jpg files, it displays one or two and then gets hung. When I insert a USB flashdrive, it runs for a few minutes, then spontaneously reboots, it does it over and over again. The remote could not possibly be laid out worse. When you look down at it, you hardly have a clue what any button does. CRAPFEST CRAPFEST! I haven't got a video file it can play. I get the beta, lets build a product thing, its great, I'm happy to support that, but shit, this thing can't do any of the things it was advertised to already be able to do. I've checked the websites, and I see hardly any activity, so I'm scared there is no comunity building around this thing.
I think this is a good idea, but instead of building it on a totally new chunk of hardware, they should have used off the shelf PC hardware, chosen a small set of video, sound, flash, cards, MOBOs, etc and started building the software on that base. Then once that's a stable working product, port it to a set-top/appliance board. Maybe start with MythTV, then make it more usable/suitable for an appliance-like device.
Thank god for the 60-day no questions asked refund!
FTA: "The Neuros OSD is small. Very small. At only 14cm wide, 14cm deep and 3.2cm high, it fits comfortably in just about any hole you'd care to stow it."
Ho hum. Once again a media device that is a different size than all my other standard sized hi-fi seperates. So I won't be getting one of these then. In fact I'm so fed up with all the non hi-fi sized "media centre" cases the only hole I'd like to stow it in belongs to the idiot who decided to use this stupid case size.
Still at least it's black instead of some variety of awful garish silver so they did get something right.
.... you would say:
-It does not taste like lemonade.
-It does not look like lemonade.
-It is not made from lemons.
-It is not opaque like lemonade.
for bunnies fucking sakes, this device has a completely different use, which I'll let you guess in order to allow you to improve your reading comprehension skillz (you read TFA I am sure, so try again).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This thing barely works and is hard to use.
Neuros bought most of the video codecs and Linux BSP from a third party. How do I know? - I was an engineer for said third party, and wrote/developed a few of the modules for this platform. In fact, I'm intimately familiar with the video and audio playback code.
That said, I have a few comments:
The sound and video often get very out of sync and sometimes the video judders, or slows to get back to where it should be...[emphasis added]
First of all, I had not observed this at all when using a pristine source. We did recognize that our coping mechanisms would produce a similar result if the incoming source had missing frames or audio, etc...
In fact A/V sync was one of the enduring problems on which I worked during my tenure. Suffice to say, we chose to gradually pull audio and video back in sync when sync was lost because our clients complained that the alternative appeared too jittery. Unlike other vendors, we could present acceptable quality playback with as much as 1/4 of the frames missing from the input stream. Most other encoders/decoders would produce a noticeable, annoying frame-jitter whenever there was a loss of either audio or video.
But, aside from that, here are some more things the article failed to mention:
Hope this helps.
I do feel some connection to this project because I did a lot of work on this platform. Truth be told, I'm thinking of buying one just for sentimental reasons; unfortunately, my company didn't hand out samples. I do know quite a bit about the BSP, and would be happy to answer any questions regarding the platform that I can.
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>the playback on that screen was quite poor
>On the other hand it played back quite nicely on my PC
This unit only has composite tv-out. 15 years ago that may have been what most users expected but composite signal will not look "good" nowadays when approximately 99.99% of video playing devices and TVs have some option of S-VHS, component or HDMI signals.
Maybe this was intended as a psp/ipod/pc video recorder with a "preview on TV" option?
I haven't had many problems in terms of longevity. Three of my systems did develop severe issues over the years, but invariably some fan in the system (1 chipset, 1 case fan, and 1 video card fan) had either stopped spinning or was spinning slowly and generating heat itself instead of mostly moving heat as it should. Replacing the fans resolved each problem. General rule of thumb is that if weirdness develops over time and persists through different OSes, hunt down bad fans and if you are lucky, no permament thermal damage has occurred. I had one motherboard blow capacitors, but that's usually a fairly hard failure, but you may want to check for non-flat capacitor tops. Aside from specefic capacitors, solid state devices tend to do well over time, so the likely culprit is some moving part (fan, hard drive).
I happen to buy almost entirely from Newegg (there is a local Tiger Direct outlet here, but they tend to be pricier than NewEgg. On the frontend I got motherboard, processor, RAM, and case/PS, so few interactions to go south, and few moving parts (3 fans). A system with a Promise SATA controller didn't work well with the sata_promise linux driver on the backend (concurrent IOs to multiple channels would knock the controller out of commision), so I bought a silicon image.
The SQL is generally transparent to the user, but sometimes granting privileges requires SQL statements be crafted/issued in a more complex backend/frontend config. Mainly I think they found it a convenient way to manage TV listings, and if requiring a DB, may as well use it. Also a natural way to share a config between backends and frontends. With only one mythbackend and some number of frontends, you don't need any file sharing to do the meat of mythtv.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Does it boot from the SD/MMC card yet?
One of the last things I did was to make the board check for an SD card at startup, and boot from that. Failing to find a card, it would then default to the flash. (More or less like the original PC's would boot floppy by default, then HD). I don't think these scripts made it into the releases, but it wouldn't be too hard to do.
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