For the past couple of years I have been a huge fan of products from Neuros. Primarily because they have been able to create a line of products that embrace fair use and give the owner of the device so much bang for the buck that I am afraid my review here is only going to be cover a small part of the capability of this very powerful media offering.
The tag line of the Neuros OSD is “Free your Media” but the thing that I think is really cool is the operating system it runs on is open source and the team at Neuros have been very busy adding features thus you will want to upgrade the firmware on your unit when you pick one up.
So what does it do well the list is long so lets break it down.
First it is a Video Recorder it will record video in .asf, .avi and .mp4 format from a variety of video sources such as a DVD Player, VCR, Cable Box, Video Camera etc.
Second it is a Video Player that can play back the same formats plus .mpeg from memory cards, external hard drives your home network onto your TV
Third it is a image viewer and I will say without a doubt that this device allows the playback of images better than the Apple TV does.
Fourth it is a music player.
The menu system is via your TV screen and it is easy to navigate.
The feature that I thought was really cool was its ability to record content from my DVD player and then write that content to an iPod or my kids PSP. Yes you heard me correctly this device will do the transcoding necessary to record media from one format and transfer it to portable devices.
Need to digitize some home movies this is the perfect device to do so and you can transfer the digitized data to a hard drive that can be played through the device or on your personal computer.
The unit comes with a remote control, will accept multiple media types, allows for S-Video input along with Composite Audio and Video input and output (RCA connector cables included) the unit has on board Ethernet 10/100 has a USB connector to hook up external drives or will accept the following memory cards. Multi-card (SD/MS/MS PRO/MS DUO/MMC) and Compact Flash (including microdrive)
Hey hackers! You wanna hack this thing and add your own features guess what! You can modify the code yes they give you access to the source code.
The Neuros team is clearly ahead of their time and they have a great product here. I fully endorse their product line and stand behind this teams great vision. This is the second Neuros device that I have reviewed and I can say that their products continue to get better every day.
The only thing that would have made this unit perfect is if it could support High Definition. I would think we will be seeing something from them on that front in the future.
Disclaimer: A Neuros OSD was provided to me to review. I will be giving this device away on my Podcast and while no promises were made on the quality of the review but I honestly love this device and will be purchasing my own unit. Which is $239.00 retail. Neuros Technology