Neuros Technology Forums

greyback -- did you format that drive with fat32?

rather than buying a product that clearly isn't ready for production release and then complaining and returning it, why don't you get involved in getting the things you want it to do happen?

hi,

no i'm still having the same problem with the new firmware. (0.23). it's a 250gb seagate external hard drive formatted with ntfs. I can see the drive in the filebrowser but it won't show me the contents of the drive...

i tried accessing a 250gb external usb drive with no luck. well, some luck -- it found the drive, i could access it using the filebrowser, but it told me there were no files on it, which isn't true it was a 250gb seagate 7200 ata drive, with a generic powered usb enclosure.

2GB Sony MS Pro-Duo didn't work

Hi there,

I'm running firmware 3.20-20 and only just received my OSD.

Last night I tested the USB drive by putting a 512mb USB flash drive in and watched a few short movies on it, so at least I know the USB area works. I just put a bunch of movies on a large 250gb drive however and plugged it in -- which I can navigate to using the OSD file browser but it doesn't show any files on it at all.

Is USB still very shaky? Or is there some way I have set the drive up that i should have done differently? The jumpers are set to Cable Select, it's an ultra ATA cable and it's formatted with NTFS.

Thanks in advance

Lee

mine also just powers on as soon as you plug it in... the PWR button on the remote doesn't seem to turn it off or on either.

I would love to be able to plug my OSD into the network and be able to access my shared folders where I store my movies + music. Can the OSD not do this at all at the moment?

32mb Sony MS Pro-Duo worked fine for me

I can indeed verify that my USB drive (a 512mb flash drive) worked nicely. It detected it within a few seconds, and I was able to read and modify information off it no problem. Even after reboot, the USB drive was eventually detected (took a while longer as it had to load other modules first).

One annoying thing though is that when you're in the filebrowser menu the USB drive doesn't automatically appear once it has been detected. You have to go out to the main menu and back in to the filebrowser to see it.

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.

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.

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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!