Specifications

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this limitation and interact with the OSD over LAN. For
more information, check out the Neuros Developer Web
site (see Resources).
OSD in the Family and on the Road
Besides the main scenarios listed in the Neuros ads, I plan
mostly to use the OSD in three other ways that are more inter-
esting to me. First, the OSD makes it possible for kids to play
YouTube clips, photos from their digital cameras or their MP3
playlists in the living room, without messing with dad’s com-
puter. Second, as the OSD is so small and light, I see it as a
traveler’s friend. Take it with you on vacations to view your
digital photos right away on any motel TV or back them up to
a USB drive, without carrying along a more expensive, fragile
and bulkier laptop. Portability and the small size also mean I
finally will be able to “steal” hours of VHS family movies
whenever I visit relatives who often don’t even own a comput-
er. Saying, “Hi, Auntie, may I plug this tiny box in to your VCR
and leave it there while we have dinner?” takes more time
than actually doing it.
Missing Pieces and Problems
The USB interface supports only the 1.1 version of the stan-
dard. Neuros itself warns that recording to USB could cause
frame drops due to speed bottlenecks. Adding a memory card
adapter (which Neuros sells separately) to the kit would have
made it more versatile. Also, the list of supported formats isn’t
100% reliable. The firmware I tested, for example, can’t
handle the .mov videos generated by my Kodak camera. The
audio played fine, but all I saw was a black screen.
The first thing I thought when I read the OSD datasheet
was that the absence of digital inputs makes it impossible
to copy DVDs or DV tapes without degradation. Neuros
answered that the OSD is meant to offer flexibility and com-
patibility with the most common TV sets, at an affordable
cost and with the simplest possible interface. They explained
(and I agreed with them) that, in this context, adding digital
output is not really necessary, especially because it wouldn’t
sensibly increase the final display quality. Digital input,
instead, would have increased the cost enough to make
the OSD really hard to sell.
Conclusion
All in all, I only had one real problem with the OSD, which I
saved for last because it is (potentially) quite serious and also
because it may well be solved by the time you read this.
As I mentioned before, the single functions work fine. The
user interface, however, froze badly enough, in certain cases,
to make the OSD unusable without doing a power cycle. To be
more specific, this happened regularly when I had the Ethernet
cable, the USB key and memory card all plugged in at the
same time. The memory card alone also slowed the device, so
part of the problem may be physical or formatting problems
with the card itself. Even with other configurations, however,
I noticed a recurring pattern. Heavy-load tasks, like playing or
encoding video or audio, would go on without problem for
hours, but using the remote too quickly or for more than a
few minutes could slow down the OSD to a halt, especially
when a storage device was plugged in.
By the looks of it, this is almost surely a bug in the particu-
lar firmware version that I tested, so don’t judge the OSD by
this problem, and check the Neuros Web site for updates. The
Neuros OSD remains a handy and versatile device, although it’s
not exactly cheap. Taken one by one, all the features work well,
and the device can be hacked and extended in many ways, so
it could be a useful addition to your digital living room.
I
Marco Fioretti is a freelance writer and digital rights activist, author of the “Family Guide to Digital
Freedom” (digifreedom.net) and member of several groups working on promoting wider adoption
of Free as in Freedom formats and software.
At the time of this writing in May 2008, the OSD
sells for $179 US at the Neuros on-line store.
Outside the US, it will be available in some
department stores in the UK and France (start-
ing in June), with broader distribution in other
countries starting later in the summer of 2008.
Resources
Supported Video Formats: www.neurostechnology.com/
neuros-osd-playback-settings
User Guide: wiki.neurostechnology.com/index.php/
OSD_Guide
Neuros Open-Source Page: open.neurostechnology.com
Developer IRC Channel: open.neurostechnology.com/irc
Developer Wiki: wiki.neurostechnology.com
Neuros On-line Store: store.neurostechnology.com
Figure 7. Browsing NFS Partitions from the TV Screen
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