Specifications

46 | august 2008 www.linuxjournal.com
Once everything was up and running, I finally started using
the OSD. I’ve played MP3 files, recorded and played TV shows
and YouTube clips and browsed digital pictures. After testing, I
can say that the OSD works as advertised. Some parts of the
user interface could be more efficient, but all in all, it is simple
to use. A French language pack is already available, and Italian,
Spanish, German, Dutch and Portuguese should follow soon.
The menu system is similar to standard living-room DVD
players, with a sliding bar on the bottom that tells you how
much free space there is on the internal memory or the exter-
nal devices (memory cards or USB drives) you are using. You
also can customize the graphic theme and screensaver.
There are three video recording modes. The first is called
Quickstart, defined in the OSD manual as “take a leap of
faith and simply press Record”. The second is Standard mode,
where you can change parameters, and finally, there’s
Advanced mode, which provides more flexibility and control
but requires a bit more competence for proper use. Image and
audio quality of TV recordings were almost indistinguishable
from the originals, even with the default settings.
The remote has standard, VCR-like keys to control video
playback. Video recorded with the OSD takes about one hour
per gigabyte at the highest quality. The maximum duration of
a recording depends on the maximum file size supported by
the host filesystem.
The YouTube browser is simple but effective. All the essen-
tial functions are grouped in Videos, Search, Favorites and
Settings submenus. The Videos menu has buttons for listing all
new clips or just the most-viewed ones for the time period you
choose (day, week, month or year). Once you find the video
you want, the OSD plays it full-screen. YouTube quality on
standard TVs isn’t great, but that’s not the OSD’s fault, and
there are no glitches during playback if your Internet connec-
tion is fast enough.
The OSD photo viewer has full-screen, thumbnail and
slideshow modes. In slideshow mode, you can configure
the duration of each slide. The audio player has a playlist-
creation functionality.
In my tests, all types of files (video, audio and pictures)
were played with the same quality, without degradation or
other problems, no matter whether they were on a memory
card, USB drive or computer on the local network.
Hey, the Command Line!
The OSD is a nice and small box with serial port, Ethernet
port, Linux inside and very little power consumption.
Besides a graphical interface built on the Qtopia toolkit, it
has a LUA interpreter, a Telnet server and BusyBox. If this
doesn’t make a hacker want to mess with the OSD, noth-
ing will. As a matter of fact, there already is a community
customizing and extending the OSD in various ways or
using it as a mini-server. To get inside the OSD, simply type
telnet and the IP address, then log in as root with the
default password, pablod. This drops you into a standard
shell, within the limits of BusyBox.
In order to browse my PC partition from the TV, using the
OSD remote, I simply typed:
mkdir /media/polaris
mount -t nfs 192.168.1.2:/mydata/osd_test /media/polaris
Note that, besides Telnet, you also can open an OSD
console on your TV from the Advanced applications menu.
The on-screen keyboard is much slower to use, but all the
keys are there.
Figure 6. Looking into the OSD via Telnet
Advanced Features and Hacking
The Advanced applications menu also lists an MP4 Video
editor (beta). When I tried it on an MP4 file on my com-
puter, it wouldn’t even open the NFS-mounted directory,
which, as I already mentioned, was reachable without
problems by the OSD file browser and picture viewer.
Neuros confirmed to me that this application is still just an
experiment, usable only on small clips stored in the cards
or USB drives.
The list of features coming soon, some of which are
Google Summer of Code projects, is really interesting.
Besides Samba, Web and FTP servers, the latest announce-
ments mention streaming via Fuse, a Last.fm client and an
Ogg Theora codec. Currently, the software that actually
plays movies and music and shows the menus, called
osdmain, is not designed to communicate with other
programs. However, work already is ongoing to overcome
REVIEWS
It’s one small box, much cheaper than
a normal computer, and it’s all you
need to migrate tens or hundreds of
VCR tapes or DVDs onto one hard
drive—if you accept the unavoidable
degradation that comes from
recording from an analog output.