Neuros Technology Forums

I am creating this thread to document my first impressions of the unfinished OSD. I am trying to be overly critical in order to see improvements made. The things I mention in this and following posts may or may not already be in bugzilla.

This post will primarily focus on the physical aspects:

The first thing I noticed when opening the box was the remote control batteries... Toshiba "Super Heavy Duty!" Now I know that a remote control is a low drain device, but Zinc-Carbon batteries scream "cheap". Alkaline batteries would be nice. Gold Peak (Hong Kong), Duracell, Energizer, the manufacturer doesn't matter so much. The OSD remote will be getting far more button presses than your standard remote.

Secondly, I found out very quickly that the power adapter plug that fits into the OSD gets dislodged pretty easily. It doesn't come all the way out, but it is enough to shut the OSD off. Curiously enough I can't cause it to happen by applying a minor force, yet it happens every other time I pick up the OSD possibly due to the weight of the power cable.

The remote is easy enough to program, but an end user in the final production model shouldn't have to do this.

USB support is going to be one of the key features that many OSD users will absolutely need above all else.

More later...

A short post regarding OSD menus:

I don't know about everyone else, but to me the OSD menu navigation is counter-intuitive (even though it is labeled).

For example, when changing the recording settings...

Usually on most electronic devices with 'navigatable' menus a person would press down to go down the menu (on the screen). Instead the OSD is set up to change the currently selected menu option settings when up or down is pressed (and this is labeled as such). In order to change the currently selected menu option a person must press the left or right arrow.

The reason this is counter-intuitive (at least for me) is because it is the exact opposite on other devices. On other devices a person uses the left or right arrows to change the settings of the currently selected menu option and they use the up and down arrows to change the selected menu item on the screen (as they are listed vertically).

It probably took me anywhere from 30-60 seconds to figure this out after pressing a whole bunch of different buttons, believe me that's an eternity.
I do not know if anyone will understand what I am talking about, maybe someone can put it in better words or make a flash demo. Basically in my opinion  "up and down should go up and down (on the screen), left and right should change the setting."

I know how it works as of now and I am constantly messing up while navigating (even though it has arrows).

Does anyone else have any opinions on this?

A friend of mine gave me late notice that he was going to be on TV, while i was at work.

So I fired up my sling box, scheduled the recording, and figured I'd bust out my new OSD and get it off of my Tivo then upload to youtube.  Punchline: it worked like a charm.

This was the first time I had turned on the OSD.  Upgrading the firmware was a piece of cake once I found the directions again (why post .zip files of a binary, why not just the package?)

Yes, I noticed and was annoyed by the menu handling weirdness.  I was also surprised to see how sluggish reponse to the menu keys is - anybody have any idea why?

Storage onto my CF card worked like a charm - except that the card filled up and truncated the video - there was probably a message on the screen that I missed.  Hey, its pre-shipping software, its ok with me.

My card had a few jpegs on it from my camera - when I tried to view one the device reset.  I didn't retry to see if its repeatable - will look into that later.

Oh, and if you hook up s-video but don't switch the menu off of composite you will get black-and-white.  Its amazing you get anything, but given that it kind of works it confused me for a little while, and off I sent making sure all the connections were nice and tight.

All in all it was probably the first occasion in a *long* time when a new piece of hardware worked exactly like it is suppose to out of the box.

In case anybody is interested in the video quality here is a link: looks great to me!

Bravo neuros, I'm looking forward to things developing further.

In reply to my post about menus...

I was finally able to upgrade the firmware using the emergency upgrade method (as the XIM menu method did not work due to "package error"). After the upgrade to 3.20_18 the menus seem to be fixed.

To date I have still not been able to make a single recording with the OSD. The screen goes black and doesn't stop being black until I stop the recording.  the file ends up being about 1024+ bytes and  if I press play all I get is more black screen. (recording from composite, 5 min recording time.)

In OSD version 3.20-0.17  and 3.20-0.18,If set the video record flle format as AVI,then make a single record,The screen goes black and doesn't stop being black until I stop the recording.If playing them,the screen also are black.This is a known issue and has fixed in version 3.20-0.19

That's great news, as ASF is fairly useless as far as editing goes. Hopefully the audio and video will be in sync soon for AVI,

Another two semi-major problems are: no sound when the unit is turned off (why doesn't this just pass through like video) bug #714 and when recording there are transparent vertical lines or bands going down the screen (it's a CRT television) I believe this is bug #659

Bug 714 is important because people are not going to want to wait for the OSD to boot everytime they want sound if the OSD happens to be off or in the middle of resetting itself.

One last thing while I remember tonight, the recorder interface as of 3.20_18 is horrible because it makes no sense. There is a bar in the center that does something (it's not labeled) is it a time display of some sort? There is also the bar in the lower left.. I assume is storage remaining but why does it show the OSD storage when I'm recording to CF or SD? Why does my SD card show up as MMC and why do I need to tell it whether I am recording to SD or MMC when only one type can fit in that slot at a time.  It might be better to say 'why are there more choices than there are slots'? Why not combine them?

One option is SD/MMC/MS another is CF, another is USB, and maybe a future network one. If SD/MMC/MS is selected then record to whichever one of those is mounted by the OSD.

Got my OSD today.  I didn't see any mention of the need to program the remote so I spent 20 minutes figuring out why it didn't work.  Got that sorted out and did an emergency upgrade to 3.20.19 (from 3.13.13??).  Interestingly, when I go to the properties the reported version is 3.13.19.  It's got the right end number (19) but not the right middle number (13 instead of 20).   Ok, no biggie.

I got ready to record and noticed no sound from my TV.  Hmmm...  ok, whatever.  I set to AVI and resolution to Super Fine and started to record.  I immediately noticed the picture bouncing up and down a bit - a vertical shake every second or two.  Stopped record, played it back and it still had no sound... and the video jiggle was still there.  Played the file on my PC te verify and it still has the jiggle but there was sound.

Swapped A/V cables and the problem reversed.  Now I had output sound but no input sound.  A bad cable, obviously.  That's an easy remedy.  What bothers me is the video jiggle.  Appears consistent with a data burst write to the CF card as there about 0.75-1.0 seconds of shake with about a 1.0 second stable video.