16. Neuros OSD Media Streaming Playback Device

The Neuros OSD is a networked media hub that enables its users to record, play, stream and share video and audio among all kinds of electronics gear. This includes your home entertainment center's TV set, receiver, DVD player, VCR and camcorder; all of your networked PCs; plus portable media devices such as iPods, smartphones, Sony Playstation, MS Xbox and more. This device basically acts like a media clearinghouse and repository, so you can grab it from whatever source you like, and play it back on any remotely compatible device.

The Neuros OSD comes in a slim, attractive package, but its form fails to do justice to its functions.

In fact, the Neuros OSD comes equipped with all kinds of interesting ports and attachments. It's got a USB port so you can hook up external hard disks, flash drives, and other media devices using standard USB cables. It's got a built-in Compact Flash / Microdrive memory card slot, and another slot that can handle Secure Digital (SD, with miniSD and microSD with the proper adapter plug-ins), Memory Stick (MS regular, Pro, and Pro Duo), and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) compatible memory cards as well.

This device gets its "OSD" designation from the company's decision to build and maintain it as an Open Source Device. Its goal is to create a general purpose media player and manager that is positioned somewhere between a closed, Windows CE device, and a media center PC that might run Windows Media Center Edition, Vista Ultimate Edition, or perhaps even MythTV or some other Linux-based media management system. In this context, the amazing speeds, feeds and capabilities of the Neuros OSD will probably make a lot more sense.

The Neuros OSD includes an IR blaster for working with cable or satellite set-top boxes, a remote control, a serial cable, an external power supply brick, and two composite video cables with the necessary jacks. There's also a 10/100 Ethernet interface for network connection. The Neuros OSD can record MPEG 4 video in both MP4 and ASF formats, and can play back video sources recorded in the MPEG-4, MPEG-2, ASF, AVI, DivX, Xvid and MOV formats. The photo viewer uses a JPEG decoder, but can also handle BMP and GIF images at resolutions up to 4,096 x 4,096. You can use the Neuros OSD to record from any video source, including TV and satellite set-top boxes, Tivo and other PVR/DVR devices, DVDs, VCRs, camcorders and video game consoles, as long as they have S-Video or composite video outputs. The USB port comes into play as the link to external storage where recordings will reside.

The Neuros OSD supports five different video resolution settings, including QVGA (320x240, used on lots of portable video players, smartphones, and so forth), plus QCIF (177x144 @ 15 fps for mobile phones), WQVGA (368x208 @ 30 fps for PSP), VGA (640x480) and D1 (720x480 for PC and TV playback). It works with lots of audio formats, including MP3 and WMA with constant and variable bit ranges from 30 to 320 kbps, as well as Ogg Vorbis up to Level 6. It can handle stereo MPEG-4 AAC-LC and G.726 audio as well.

The dimensions of this little powerhouse are 5.5" x 5.5" x 1.25" (14 cm x 14 cm x 3.2 cm), which makes it petite enough to plop down just about anywhere, even in a crowded dorm room. Neuros also stresses that its Open Source philosophy means that as new software gets written and new capabilities added, owners can download and install them at will. At a price of $229, the Neuros OSD isn't exactly cheap, but it's far cheaper than most Tivo devices or media PCs, and does pretty much everything they can do in a much smaller, more attractive, and more easily upgradeable package. What more do ya want? Your back-to-schoolers will be dying to have one!

For more information about the Neuros OSD, please visit the vendor's