Neuros Technology Forums

Hi there :)

Just got my hands on a new osd with 3.20-20 firmware and thought i'd post my thoughts so far...

Nice packaging! box looks very professional.

Opened the box... hmm, equipment looks pretty flash, and while the quick-start guide looks pretty slim on the ground it promises a full manual available for download at http://www.neurostechnology.com/support/support.asp. Alas, there's no manual's availabe for the OSD on this page, but there are a few pages for other neuros devices you can read through... some of which have "feature coming soon" promises dating back to 2003... kind of scary but hmmmm where's that manual?

The quick start guide keeps me happy for now though as i'mjust keen on plugging it in and having a look. i'm in the antipodes, so the first thing i need to do to get the device plugged in is attack my power supply with a pair of pliers to bend the pins the right way round. Plug in, turn on and hey! there it is, in all its, um, grey, fuzzy, flickery glory. oh, that's probably just another antipodean thing... yep, there's the button, PAL properly selected, hooray! there it is! Full colour.

Looking at the menu: it's a bit flickery... like the refresh rate needs to be changed or something, but I can't figure out how to do that. The text for the menu options are a bit funny too, with the text kind of being mangled at the bottom of each word.

It's certainly not the best looking user interface (apologies to anyone who might take offence here... it's definitely not the worst looking either, I'm not trying to offend just be honest), things kind of jump around as I navigate through the options, and the IR for the remote seems to hop between being overly sensitive, jumping through several options when I just wanted to move to the next option, or not moving at all, but it's definitely simple and I can see exactly what I can do right from the beginning.

Into the settings now. First thing I do is go to set the clock. The way this is set up seems a bit counter intuitive. To jump between days and months (let's ignore the fact that the date for us is dd/mm/yy and this isn't an option) you have to press the down button, and to increase the value of the selected option you have to press the left button. Seems a little backwards to me, shouldn't you press the right button to increase values? Hmm, the hour starts at 0 and I can't go the opposite way to get to 50, I have to go all the way through the numbers. I'll hold the button down to skip through quickly... oh weird, it seems to work quickly but then the counter just resets back to 0 or 10 again. Ah well, I'll get there eventually by just pressing the button one at a time.

I choose PAL as my default video option, and reboot excitedly because I missed the boot up screens, they were all fuzzy and greyed out. Oh, they're still yucky, fair enough, but to my delight after the boot sequence the OSD UI switches automatically to PAL! After it's all in colour there's still some booting up stuff going on down the bottom, it's loading packages and other stuff that looks kind of scary. I know what it's doing but it's still kind of intimidating and it makes me worry about whether it's OK to be doing stuff while it's loading this stuff or if I should just leave it til it's finished...

I realise I've got the most recent firmware but I want to try upgrading anyway so I download the latest package from the site and put it on a 32mb MS-Duo. Pop it into the OSD, and without rebooting I can navigate right to it and hit upgrade, very simply, no problems at all. Bonus!  Makes up for the rather ugly (and back to NTSC) upgrading screens.

I want to try other things but it's a bit late and I want to go to bed. I'm wondering whether it's OK to leave the OSD on all the time, whether it gets hot, or if I should turn it off and give it a rest when I'm not using it. I want to know these things, but there's no manual at that web address... Come to mention it, I've read some place about going to www.osd.neurostechnology.com for some information but that address seems broken. I try it without the www (just in case) but nope, that's not it either.

I'll try watching some video on it soon!

/bed.

*******************

disclaimer:
I'm trying to write this with a more consumer viewpoint as opposed to a more technical one. I realise people might get upset with this and tell me if I don't know what I'm doing I shouldn't be using the OSD but I know there's going to be people out there soon just like this!

I *had* to try the video! so I didn't go to bed straight away. Instead, I loaded up a USB drive with a few little video clips: a couple of .movs, a .wmv, an .mpg, an .mp4 and a .swf for good measure.

Loading the USB drive was a piece of cake. Just plug the drive in, and within a few seconds the drive was recognised and I could get to it using the file browser.

The first thing I did was browse to the top file, which was a .mov, and hit the "enter" button, which for some reason meant it tried to run the file. I was presented with the console screen, with all sorts of interesting information. Didn't play the mov file though, and the only way I could figure out how to get back to the file browser was by using the "home" button on the remote.

This time when I got to the contents of the USB drive there was a white box filling much of the screen, which I think was a "this file is being used, so you can't do much else" box. I couldn't do anything with it so I decided to try and just go ahead with playing something else. I selected the .wmv file and hit play this time.

Result! the video played, in beautiful full screen and it looked excellent. But... no sound. Hmm. Can't have that, so I try and get out of the video to play another. Try pressing a bunch of buttons, including what looks like the "stop" button (but it's hollow so I'm not sure whether it's "stop" or some kind of display properties button), the "home" button, the "go back" button... none of which work, and then I notice the picture had frozen. Before I had to figure out what to do however, the OSD rebooted with a scary "click". So, bad result for the .wmv file.

I try the .mpg and the .mp4 and they both work beautifully though! Unfortunately if I try pressing too many buttons the device gets a little confused though and ends up freezing.

For some annoying reason though if you just play the working video right through it decides each time to play the .wmv file straight after it, even though it's not next in the file browser list, so each time I play a working video right through I have to wait for the device to freak out and reboot.

I also try the .swf  (confident I know what's going to happen at this stage) and sure enough, I get the console and the "file being used, get over it" disalog box.

So video results:

USB drive works nicely, even when rebooted it detects it after the device has gone through a bit of other module loading.
.wmv : picture, no sound.
.mov : nope
.mp4 : works nicely
.mpg :  works nicely (yay the katamari trailer!)
.swf : not strictly video, but potentially useful to have! nope.

Have yet to try a big old .avi but based on those results I'm pretty confident they'll play.

I gotta agree with everything said above. The points I wish to (re-)emphasise are:

Menus aren't very pretty - I don't like the browny-red colour scheme or the background picture, it just looks pixelated and ugily. For text readability it should use more contrasting text/background colours. The menus flash like mad, the whole screens redraws when scrolling, very inefficient!

Why waste screen space with the time? My video, microwave, oven, phone, watch all have the time, I don't want my tv to have it too. If I want to know the time, I look at my watch. If I want to watch a video, I'll use the OSD.  And I'd rather you showed the capacity of the storage drives only when recording. A TV has a small screen, lets use the screen efficiently.

I really hope that they manage to build something new from the Enlightenment engine, as it's seriously cool looking, but simple to use, if you look at this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfnRIiMydSs). It relys on pictures more than text, as text is harder to recognise on small screens.

Remote control is a bit erratic, but I think it's because the OSD spends so much time redrawing the screen that button pushes get queued and so your selection flys off! I doubt it'd be an issue if the menus are redone.

Movie playback is a mixed bag for me. Some play perfectly. Some are jerky, I'm guessing frames are being dropped like mad which I hope is a firmware issue and not that the processor is too slow. When a file is not supported, it just crashes, which needs work. I'd rather a message going "Sorry, unknown codec!" Also I've had videos crashing mid-playback.

There are too many blank screens when using the OSD. Bootup displays some blank screens, it's hard to know what's happening. Selecting a file to play reveals a blank screen for a good 5 seconds before it plays - a simple "Loading..." message would suffice.

I know there's a bug in Bugzilla for this, but the on-screen display when pausing, fast forwarding or rewinding playback shows too many unnecessary things. Once again, the time is there! Why? Only a progess bar with current/total time of video and an icon showing what you're doing are necessary. Also while rewinding/fast forwarding, the sound is normal while the picture scans for a few seconds, strange.

Another annoyance with GUI, when you rest on a video file for a while, an info box appears. Why? I don't care when it was created or modified! Text is too small too! What I would like to see is long file names scrolling though. Nor do I like seeing a command prompt on TV! Typing on a remote to that is a terrible idea. You should only be able to play recognised videos and music files and display images, the rest shouldn't appear at all! I don't want to be able to delete or rename such files either!

For the recorder feature, if the OSD made such files, then it's okay to delete and (if you've the patience) rename them, but anything more complex you should use a PC. I'm not a believer in adding small features to complicate products, which is why I'm an Apple fan. I guarantee you the iTV won't let you delete videos.

Samba sharing is in the works, so that'll be invaluable. People are complaining about NFS support being considered too geeky, but I'd rather see the most useful protocol being perfect, than two imperfect attempts. Network time should work then too, save entering time on that page (use the number keys for entry too!). It also should have DCHP on by default, if it's not then the user has to set up a static ip anyway, if it does work then the user is amazed!

Great idea: remote being able to control TV, I like being able to adjust the volume without hunting for the TV remote (pity the channel buttons don't work, but it can be reprogrammed I think).
Great idea: allowing people to develop apps for this. If the base system is solid, people will be able to make cool modules to add features in time, but your developer manuals at the moment are in short supply. Help us to help you! (although why people insist on getting a webserver working is beyond me, why?)

I'm excited with the potential of this product, but at the moment the stability and usability are in need of a lot of work. But I eagerly await the next firmware releases!
-G

Hi  All,
I have got to agree with what you said above, OSD has some flaws now. But we will make it perfect in further.
about MS card, we can support normal MS card of SONY now, MS(PRO& DUO) work unstable yet, I apology for this.
Thanks for you support Neuros OSD produnction and give me extremely winged suggestion.
You can download our new publish (3.25-0.23) firmware to upgrade the OSD.
I can promise this version will make OSD work very stable.
Regards
Caven

Wish I could agree, but with the new firmware I'm still finding that the same video files crash the OSD. But I have seen the odd message that the file is not supported, which is an improvement!

When I have more time, I'll begin submitting to bugzilla and trying to help out.

One question I want answered: what file formats/codecs are supported by design? I don't want to log a bug about a file that fails to play to be told it's not supported.
-G

Wow!  Lots of great feedback here, and these are the kind of messages that are read over and over and get passed around.  We really are listening.

A few random thoughts/incomplete response: 

first, the OSD should really support any MPEG-4 SP (not h.264 based files) up to 720x480, so XviD, DivX, .mp4, .mov, etc.  we have a pretty comprehensive list of supported audio codecs (AAC, MP3, g726, Ogg, etc) and there are not many that fundamentally "are not supported." the basic philosophy of the device is that we know video formats are a mess, but the user shouldn't have to worry about that.  Put just about anything in the OSD and it'll play (at least that's the goal).  That being said WMV support is quiet incomplete and then there are all the DRM issues.

Regarding complexity, renaming files, etc.  Certainly we need to put more effort (a lot more effort) in making the device more user friendly, but I don't agree that we should take Apple's approach.  First our user base is quite different from Apple (involved, geeky, tech saavy), second, if we try to emulate Apple, we'll surely end up in the Apple wannabe category, which is pretty much where everyone else is.  Apple does what they do well, but it's not the right approach for everyone.  I think renaming and deleting files is important functionality, particuliarly when viewing home photos (as an example).  I want to be able to delete and rename them (heck maybe even post them to flickr).  We haven't done a great job of making that appealing, but I do think it's important functionality.  I really beleive that one reason that the DMA market has failed to take off is the lack of interactive functionality to date.  No question, computers are ubiquitous, and there is a low threshold for interactivity.  It won't take much before you abandon the remote for the PC, but that threshold is not zero.  I've seen folks with mp3 streamers that have little notepads where they keep notes about bad files, metadata, etc for later correction on the PC.  More often though, you just live with it, but an easy unobtrusive way to interact on the file, I think it's important.

Thanks for the list of supported file formats... that helps a lot.  I'm looking for a "VLC/mplayer like" appliance where I can throw it just about anything and it will play -- it looks like that is what you're shooting for, and thats awesome. 

As for the "Apple" perspective, I tend to agree.  Apple does an awesome job making stuff that works extremely well (and thats why my main comp is a mac) but their downfall lies in the fact that they sometimes will compromise features for simplicity.  This mentality works extremely well for them and most people... microsoft's new portable media player has the ability to "beam" songs to other users so they too can hear the song.  Job's response to this technology was simply "we do that too... its called taking one of your headphoes and sticking it the other person's ear"  However, some of us do like the goofy solutions like this.  You just have to make sure you don't clutter up the UI with silly features that 2% of people might find useful. 

Features are great, but it's important to have a way to disable them if its not something that everybody would use. 

Fair enough, I perfectly understand. Your business direction is clearer to me now. Additional featurettes do appeal to this user group, but I hope these options don't make the final product look more complicated than it is?

To rant briefly, highly featured products are becoming more complicated to use, and I find it annoying that things which are supposed to make our lives easier and more entertaining instead consume our time getting them to work. For instance I think mobile phones are overladen in features, as all I really want is voice calls and text messages. If I want to send an email or surf the web, I use a proper pc with proper keyboard and screen. But not everyone's like me!

Can't put it better than this. I respect other people's preferences, and believe that a debate like this will never end! Hence the old PC vs. Mac war.

The OSD has the makings of a great product, and I'm very excited by it. But the GUI needs work! Any word on Enlightment?
-G

I would like to add that although the video playback feature set may be limited at this time. That long term the OSD will likely support more video types then any other player. I have a MVIX and it supports a large number of files but in no way does it support .wmv and .mov. This device is still in gamma so it’s almost ready for the everyday user but not quite. I would also like to point out that Neuros unlike other companies believes in protecting our digital rights as opposed to trampling on them like most other media device makers. If you would like to learn more and I highly recommend you do Wiki search on DRM and trusted computing and read up on what’s coming down the pipe if the bigger companies get their way. I apologize for the soap box but initially I wasn’t happy with the feature set of my OSD either but the company’s position on digital rights and knowing that improvements will be rolled out regularly are enough for me to stick with it.

Stay free
d

looks to me like quite a few problems are caused by the mediaplayer itself....
why do you not use mplayer? it has support for almost everything out there, even flv. it can encode and its free, what else do you need?

Hi,

I have had the OSD for a little over a week.  Upon connecting everything up for the first time, I was immediately disappointed.

1.  The remote control didn't function properly - you could not turn the OSD on or off at all.  Powering the unit down meant unplugging the power connector from the OSD.  Not very hi tech.  This needs to be fixed!  It is a terrible first impression item.

2.  Trying to use the original firmware that was loaded was an exercise in frustration.  The only mode that I could attempt a recording at was .asf.  The Mpeg-4 and AVI both failed miserable.  The audio sync was hopelessly out of sync with the video

3.  The unit rebooted at random times.

4.  My impression was that the unit was definitely not ready for release to a consumer.

..........................................

I updated the firmware to .23 (Nov 02) and was initially pleased:

I could now actually talk to my USB thumb drive and could actually record an .avi file at super fine resolution.  UNTIL the thing started re-booting again radomly.  This is so frustrating when you are trying to record a 60 minute program and the OSD decides to reboot 55 minutes into it, leaving you with a useless avi fragment.

The remote control still is almost worthless - doesn't turn the unit on or off.

I truly want this device to work and I am reluctant to return it BUT, something had better change quickly.  There is either a serious software problem or a terrible quality control issue with this device.

I will be watching the threads closely in the next few days.

I sympathise with all your points except this one. Why do you want it to turn off? Ultimately when the software is stable, I'd be happy leaving it on all the time, saving waiting a minute for it to boot each time.

The power button on the remote turns my TV off, which I think is much handier, along with the voume buttons it saves me hunting for the TV remote for the basic functions.

The firmware is progressing, it's becoming more stable but there's still a lot to be done. It is a Gamma release after all. All you can do (aside from returning of course) is wait and see how the firmware progresses.
-G

Lemajors's comments are right on the money. My initial impressions of the user interface were:-

-- You can learn a lot from owning a TiVo (which, BTW, is a Linux box). The graphics and user interface is really well thought out on the TiVo, the OSD isn't anything like as good.
-- You have to update the video during the vertical blanking interval, if you don't you get an annoying flicker as that part of the image is changed
-- The remote control is anemic. I don't think its the remote's fault, it appears that the software in the OSD has very high latency and chokes if you have to keep the remote sending (like, for example, when you're scrolling an address entry to 255 -- ever thought of going down as well as up?). Needless to say, the TiVo's remote is responsive (and its got nicely thought out gimmcks such as backing up the fast forward when stopping to compensate for the human reaction time and system lag).

From a developer perspective I'm a bit disappointed. I'm used to working on these types of small systems and I'd expect the platform to be a lot more stable at this stage of the game -- the application might crash, things may not be implemented but the system should alway stay up. One thing that would contribute to this is a more modular approach to the software -- I've yet to poke around the sources but it appears that the application is one monolithic thing like a typical Windoze app so, not surprisingly, it behaves just like one.  (Its also as tedious to develop and debug as one......) What I'd expect to see is a bunch of functional programs doing things like recording and playing media, each with their own configuration files and assorted support libraries, plus applications to edit those configuraton files with the whole lot driven from a gui that shells these programs as needed (note that a webserver is an example of this type of thing). I'd also expect to see a lot more use of scripting.

Other things I've noticed are that I can't automount my Compact Flash card and I can't alter fstab to uncomment or change the lines to try doing so -- the file may be marked read/write but the filesystem appears to be read-only.  So it looks as if I have to build and burn a new image to try anything -- but the image is burnt into on-board Flash, something that's OK for occasional use but dicey if you're doing it all the time (much better to park your development filesystem on a removable Flash drive like the CF). One example of the problems of updating is from going from .20 to .23 my CF moved from hdc to hda....there's no rhyme or reason to this, it just says to me that the build environment is suspect.

For the future, note that ARM seems to do a nice line in brochures and technical glitz but I've always found that their processors (ARM5, ARM7) suck compared to MIPS, PowerPC or even x86 running at the same clock rate.  Their main claim to fame is small footprint on the silicon and, as they say, you get what you pay for.......

I would be happy leaving the unit on all the time except for the constant clicking noise it makes when it goes through endless reboot cycles all night long.  This is a little annoying since I currently have the unit in my bedroom.

>The firmware is progressing, it's becoming more stable but there's still a lot to be done. It is a Gamma release after all. All you can do (aside from returning of course) is wait and see how the firmware progresses. (greyback)

I thought the whole point was to toss the firmware out into the environment and see what happens.

You (i.e Neuros) going to meet all sorts of people out there. Some are going to be enthusiastic hobbyists, people who may not be very experienced but are full of energy and interest. Some might be people who've spent a lifetime in product design and development, not to mention software project and project team management.  Many will be in-between and from just the sprinkling of posts in this thread its obvious that Joe Born, who thought our user base was not "geeky/tech savvy" (like Apple users???(!)*), is probably underestimating everyone a bit.  For my part, I'm comparing this unit with a Mikrotec board which I'm using for a completely different type of project (not a router, though, for those who know the 522). I'm not interested in the stability of the application(s) as much as the stability of the platform because working on those applications is a waste of time until the platform is stable.  So, getting down to basics, I'd like to know whether those crashes people report are actually crashes or system panics that cause a watchdog to trip -- and if there's a watchdog tripping then is it because some driver's holding the processor and so not letting the watchdog update. All this usually updates a log ni the /var/log/messages file or similar but we've got an environment that is missing all that good stuff. You can develop without it, you can develop with just a serial port and a few printfs (the "Bare Knuckles" school of software engineering), but you'd be crazy to do this in a tool rich environment like Linux.

Put another way.....Linux systems don't usually crash. If they do it should take but a couple of minutes to figure out why and do something about it.

I'll plod on with upacking the development tarball, but I'll do it on a spare system........

*Yes, I know people who use Apple systems as BSD platforms with a nice interface (i.e."geeky"). But that's not Apple's primary market.

>I'll plod on with upacking the development tarball, but I'll do it on a spare system........

Well, the development environment wasn't as intimidating as it looked at first sight. I was a bit worried that it might screw up my other crossdevelopment environment but its actually quite benign.

One further thought about these sorts of TiVo like devices -- TiVo recently started shipping their "Series 3" HD unit.  We are rapidly switching over to HDTV  and while its clear that this OSD hasn't really got the horsepower for anything other than standard definition its a good advanced prototype platform for a future generation HD device.  This is going to be the only route for HD work in the future, everything commerical seems to be encumbered with a growing obsession with 'rights', essentially you end up paying more and more for equipment that does less and less.  Even the TiVo is gradually being infected -- I like my Series 1 because TiVo isn't upgrading the software any more so I don't have to worry about advertisement overlays, locked out or limited time recordings or any of the other 'enhancements' that they've made to the later units.

Wow, I didn't know TiVo were going like that. It is a breath of fresh air that Neuros have a "just play/record the damn file" attitude, DRM is becoming far too unpleasant now.

P.S. for the record, Joe Born *does* think this product has a "geeky/tech savvy" user base, it is I who opined that it might be worth embracing the less technologically able user and simplifying the GUI. I'm an Apple user, but enjoy the BSD roots, my logic was that the OSD could be similarly designed.