Neuros Technology Forums

Well, I guess I haven't been hanging out on my corner much lately.  Sorry, I'll do better with that going forward.  I think your idea is pretty interesting, but I feel that first we have to get our product really awesome, and not a "work in progress," it's getting there, but as we all agree, it's not as slick as it needs to be to be a full fledged mainstream viiv killer...

In the short to medium term, I really feel the "big company" to partner with could well be TI.  I say this for a number of reasons, first we already have a relationship with TI, and they've expressed considerable interest in furthering that relationship.  Second, they can bring us (and have a vested interest in bringing us) what we really need now, a bigger developer community.  TI has the leading embedded multimedia solution, and they are actively supporting Linux on it.   Neuros hackers are essentially TI hackers, and they have the industry footprint to bring a lot of attention to our products, software and community. 

greyback, I think it's great stuff, and I can certainly tell you that from a high level, sharing (you were specific to YouTube) is definately top of the list for the OSD.

I love the flexibility of an open-source pvr, which is why I want to support the OSD.  However, I'm wondering if it it might be too early in the game for someone like me who's not going to try to run Asterisk, Apache, Kai, etc. right away but rather looking first for a networked, monopoly-free PVR that will keep up with the next 3-5 years of media and then - as a distant second - wants to play with embedded linux.

Is there a site where I could find some recorded video samples from the OSD, or is it too early for that?

You really should be the absolute sweet spot of our target market.  I think if we can't support your needs we're in some trouble.  The actual embedded hacker market is really too small to support this device alone.  The third party/open source development should be a benefit to you as a user. 

Well, as you'll see from some of the other forum postings, the video quality is still improving so I'm hesitant to upload files since we're working on it, but I suppose I really should since particuliarly at the medium settings, we have some good samples...

misteragony, any specific information you have or even small file samples would be much appreciated in solving this.

good idea, I added to bugzilla

http://bugzilla.neurostechnology.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1175

wow, sorry that we haven't been more responsive.  There's no excuse for that, and I appoligize, I'll look into it.

The good news regarding your video cables is "anywhere." we deliberately chose standard cables that you can buy anywhere.   Here's one example http://www.audio-discounters.com/pr-126.html but it's a generic part, look for mini AV connectors, or just ask for something to connect your camcorder to your TV with composite connectors.

well, we will certainly have an OSD 2, with a lot of what you are looking for, but it's really entirely too soon to give a schedule, I'd say 6 months is probably not realistic, and certainly too soon to talk about an upgrade discount.  Just out of curiosity, have you compared component and composite side by side on SD content?  I'm just curious why it's a deal breaker for you.  In our testing, it's been very difficult to tell the two apart with SD content.  I'm wondering what you are seeing that's so different.

Dollar Bill, this is definately of interest to me too, and we are certainly working on this functionality, complete with DVD navigator, etc.  vob support should come in the next release or two (a couple weeks) although a complete DVD navigator is still a couple months away realistically.

Please join us Sat afternoon (US Time) for a Neuros OSD User meeting:

see http://open.neurosaudio.com/node/741 for details.  You can join the meeting just by clicking on http://open.neurostechnology.com/cgiirc/ filling in your own nickname where it says nickname and you're in.  Don't worry about special ettiquete, it's very informal, we just want to here how you're using the device and what you want to see done with it.

Did 0.58 fix this?  http://open.neurostechnology.com/node/734

If not, we need to get this in bugzilla and escalate.  Sorry for the slow response and dropping the ball on not checking the forums more regularly, I thought we were doing a more systematic job of that.  I'll get it fixed.

I have no idea, but we should definately raise a red flag high on this issue.  Is it in bugzilla?  If not, I'll put it in there and escalate

It should be fine to leave it on all the time, that's what it's designed for.

Also, there is a "hack" to get USB Wifi Working:  http://open.neurostechnology.com/node/552  obviously we are working to have official support for this. it will likely be a month or two.

I record output from a HDTV all the time and it generally works well, except there is a big bug that the OSD squishes widescreen output to 4:3 http://bugzilla.neurostechnology.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1015  I can correct this on the TV for playback there, but the affected files are all but useless on the PC.  Once fixed, it should work well, although the files will be SD, they still look quite good, IMHO.

Great discussion and thanks for that.  Not all of it what we want to hear of course, but important stuff.

I'll try to answer in order. 

1. The remote/UI is not responsive enough, agreed and we're working on that.

2. The positioning of the device (at least initially) is a media adapter that records, so playing back all of your files is vitally important to us.  There's no reason that big files should crash the device.  What version of the firmware are you using?  As of today 3.27-0.58 is the most recent, but the most recent can always be found at http://open.neurostechnology.com/taxonomy/term/28 please help us by reporting any files that won't play.  This is definately a top priority.

3. jpeg support was so poor, we dropped in entirely for the time being, but it will be back shortly and more robust.

4. the community being spread out is indeed a problem, the reality is though that these various mediums are not quiet redundant, there are forum people and there are mailing list people.  Any attempt to move one to the other medium will fail, and we've tried.  Hopefully we can integrate them one day, but as it is not, users primarily use the forums and developers primarily use the mailing list.  Over time, I hope this distinction becomes more clear, and we do need more consolidated information in the other places (wiki, web etc) that's an ongoing project.

5. agreed that nothing we do should break the existing fucntionality and we are implementing regression testing, etc.  I'll be the first to admit our development/release procedure has been too sloppy to date, in part because we're really just coming out of beta type firmware.  Now that the firmware is becoming usable, that's changing, breaking working things does matter and we recognize that.

BTW, if you're interested to know what our short term priorities are, check http://open.neurostechnology.com/node/739 and http://open.neurosaudio.com/node/677 I'm sorry I know those are just two more links to bookmark, but while we're waiting for better web consolidation/organization, I figured I'd pass those along.

sorry for my ignorance but this is what you use in lieu of samba (for playing video files on the OSD that are stored on your windows box)?  Is that right?