How active is developement?

[Libreman]

Hi, I'm just wondering because there seem to be no updates for a long time, how active is this project? Is development still ongoing or is it abandoned?

Thank you

[ChadV]

The OSD has been discontinued for several months.  All of the source is still available if you wish to make alterations yourself.

[pfft2001]

The OSD has been discontinued for several months.  All of the source is still available if you wish to make alterations yourself.

Just out of curiosity...

When you say "The OSD has been discontinued", do you mean (in addition to the obviously true fact that there is no software development in progress) that it is no longer being produced and/or sold?

(Yes, I know this question always gets a "When we know, we'll let you know" sort of reply, but...)

Is there any information available as to when it might become "un-discontinued"?  And/or when the OSD2 or OSD3 might be marketed?

[ChadV]

Generally "discontinued" refers to the cessation of production and sales, as it does in this case.

There are no plans for the OSD to become un-discontinued, unless you wish to buy in quantities over 1,000 for re-branding.

As far as the overall status of Neuros:
http://groups.google.com/group/neuros/browse_thread/thread/6c102b1630404f1b

[pfft2001]

Generally "discontinued" refers to the cessation of production and sales, as it does in this case.

There are no plans for the OSD to become un-discontinued, unless you wish to buy in quantities over 1,000 for re-branding.

As far as the overall status of Neuros:
http://groups.google.com/group/neuros/browse_thread/thread/6c102b1630404f1b

Thanks.  That thread explains it all and quite well.

It does seem like the idea of working a deal with Amazon to buy a few thousand of them and then let Amazon (or similar) deal with retailing them - is a good one.

I also like the idea of developing controllers for all of our connected devices.

[heyrick]

The OSD has been discontinued for several months.

This is not a surprise, for SD video is getting a bit old hat. Not that it is going to go away any time soon, though I suspect a good number of the sorts of people that would buy something like the OSD have a lot of HD kit.

All of the source is still available if you wish to make alterations yourself.

"All" being the kernel, Qt4, the base Linux system, and the Neuros API/apps. However note that all of the interesting stuff is closed source. So if you think "wouldn't it be cool to tweak the video recorder to output XviD *, you're plain outta luck".

* - as it is H.263, basically stuffing it into an AVI wrapper and mangling the FourCC ought to be enough to get most "DivX" compatible devices to play the content. I say XviD, however, as I've not yet found a DivX player that failed on a comparable XviD, and I find the resultant quality of image to be better with XviD at the same bitrate. Heck, I'v even had DivX players (mostly) cope with 3ivx format - so I don't see why the OSD's output would be any different... except it is in "industry standard"

• MPEG4 files, which most stand-alone players plain don't understand.

# - this waffle about industry standard is a total red herring. MPEG4 is an unholy mess of rubbish; both H.263 (OSD and the DivX era) can be a valid MPEG4 file, as can the later H.264 as used by the likes of Youtube. They are totally incompatible, yet both "MPEG4". As for the file format, nothing states that what the OSD generates is a valid MP4 file. As it happens, it is. But then, so would a file containing four audio tracks and corresponding captioning data. The captioning data, incidentally, aimed at high-end equipment, which is why most of the animé fansubs are MKV files instead.

Speaking of which, wouldn't it be nice if the OSD could handle MKVs? I suspect it can if somebody wrote a filter to extract the subtitling and rip apart the video/audio stream (akin to the Flash stripper), but it'd be a rather inelegant solution.

For us Brits, wouldn't it be nice to jack into teletext, lock into p888, and build a subtitle file on the fly during recording. The tvp5150 can do this sort of thing. Likewise it can offer you fine control over contrast, brightness, sharpness... think your recordings are a little too dark? A little fuzzy? No problems, just... oh wait, the closed source driver doesn't permit this sort of stuff to be done. Meh.


Best wishes,

Rick.