Test Drive: Neuros OSD

In a given school year in the late 20th century, back in the heyday of VHS, I could count the number of student-produced video projects on one hand. These days, thanks to inexpensive digital video hardware and speedy, nonlinear editing software, we average that kind of video project output every week. The biggest hurdle remaining may be the issue of ensuring that video (and other media) can be properly and conveniently shared, stored, and screened.

After all, the conventional TV is no longer the sole venue for video. Along with high-end entertainment centers, video is consumed on Web browsers, mobile phones, digital music players and game consoles, each favoring particular resolutions and codecs. That means getting your video—be it originally analog or digital—to its target sets of eyeballs requires a tool that can record, store, and play an alphabet soup of media formats—a tool like the Neuros OSD.

Before I detail what the Neuros OSD does, let me dispense with a quick caveat: If you’re looking for a device for creating discs playable on a standard DVD player, Neuros isn’t for you. It doesn’t record to optical media; seek out a good DVD recorder instead. It will, however, convert your DVD, VHS or any media source to a variety of formats storable on digital flash cards.

Like the similar SanDisk V-Mate I reviewed in the April 2007 issue of SLJ, Neuros accepts standard composite A/V output from video sources like DVD and VHS players and converts and stores them on your choice of flash card including Memory Stick, CF, SD, or MMC. It takes things a bit further, though.

The Neuros can also save to and read from USB thumb drives or USB external hard drives, access any media on your network via wired Ethernet (included) or wireless bridge (sadly, no built-in wireless card). It can save and play most popular formats of music and image files, to boot. Though a small-capacity CF card ships with the unit, it’s intended merely to make sure you have enough storage to perform firmware updates. No internal media storage is provided, so you’ll have to supply the removable storage necessary to save all your stuff.

Speaking of firmware upgrades, OSD stands for “Open Source Device,” and the manufacturers of this Linux-based machine are hoping that developers will continuously tweak its code, adding functionality over time. The firmware update I performed went smoothly, escalating me through several software releases in about 10 minutes, but enabling no earth-shattering gains in terms of capabilities. A couple of extras were already in place: Though Neuros says they do not plan on developing a Web browser for the device, they have, for example, added a YouTube function that lets Internet-connected users search and play directly from the site.

Shortcomings? There are a few. As I’ve already hinted, built-in wireless would be a big plus. I’d like to see HD capability, too, on the menus, at least—which looked kind of blocky on my HDTV—if not in terms of its ability to handle HDTV content. I was also disappointed with its inability to handle a VGA movie I had on hand that was saved in popular WMA format. The literature later revealed that it was only capable of playing WMA movies in QGA resolution, a smaller 320 x 420 box. I’m hopeful that future upgrades will remedy that.

Like the SanDisk V-Mate, Neuros OSD comes equipped with an infrared link that lets you communicate with most cable and satellite boxes via the supplied remote to schedule and record programming, TiVo-style. The Neuros OSD makes sure that the personal video renaissance that is probably happening in your school system thrives by ensuring that all that creativity actually gets appreciated, whether it be on the Web, on TV, on a phone, or on a game console.

Neuros Technology International. www.neurostechnology.com $179.99.