Neuros Technology Forums

The good news is that I have found the audio/video sync to be much better lately. I loaded up the .27 release and although the quality still isn't as good as playing back the file on a PC it is getting there. I notice that when the system is loading, at the bottom of the screen, it loads a divx 3.?? codec? As I am using version 6 to encode the dvd's is this why there is such a loss in quality? on a PC it is nearly as good as watching the original dvd.

But more important is an aspect ratio problem. 90% of my encoded dvd's are widescreen, and they are all playing back stretched to 4:3 or even worse. Very slimming for some actors but not really watchable.

Update: I took everything off the 250gb hard drive and set up a single 30gb partition on it and that worked. So there is a barrier somewhere between 32gb and 198gb on the partition size, can anyone tell me what it is without me having to keep redoing it?

I just upgraded to the new .27 release and thought I would give it another try. This time I loaded up a 250gb drive into my USB enclosure, first thing I found was that I couldn't format a FAT32 partition larger than 32gb in Windows XP, and I know this thing won't work with NTFS. So I used Partition Magic 8.0, this created one at around 198gb and another at 40 odd gb. All well and good, so I loaded 20 or so divx files onto the main partition and plugged the drive into the OSD. Going into the file browser the screen is just blank with /media at the top. Unplugged, replugged, reset etc, still nothing. Did something happen to the USB interface in the latest revision? To check this I plugged back in my old 4gb drive I had been using for testing and that worked.
So my question is, what are the rules for attaching a HD via USB? We already know that NTFS is out, FAT32 should work but is there a maximum partition size? Apparently this latest version can handle multiple partitions on the drive. Maybe it can only see partitions of 32gb?
Also, as the top of the screen displays /media, do files have to be a certain folder structure to be seen? or maybe just in the root?

I'll probably find some of this out by further testing but I'm curious as to what other users have found on this.

I've only had half an hour or so to play with it this evening but preliminary tests show a definate improvement. I have 2 newer divx files on the HD, the first played ok, I fast forwarded a bit and it stayed in sync (much better) but when I kicked it into reverse then back to play it lost it again. Both of these files are widescreen, the first file played correctly but the second stretched to more than the screens height (not 16:9 but more like 4:4), it was a bit jerky but managed to stay in sync as well as the first file.
I recorded a 5 min test in fine mode, playing back the first time the unit rebooted about 2 minutes in. But after the reboot it played through ok. Again the screen was a little jumpy, and missed some frames here and there, but it was better than before.
I have a network cable plugged in and it picks up the DHCP info just fine. I have not seen any of the constant rebooting some of the others are reporting.
That's all I have for now but it has been nice to be able to report something a little more positive now. If I find out anything more I'll let you all know.

Great, looking forward to it. I'll try and get to it tonight after work. If I could just see a basic feature such as playing a movie file off a USB connected HD, with smooth playback and being able to fwd and rev without losing sync I'd be much happier. This would prove that the hardware can do it. Personally I like divx and that is how my movie collection is stored so the device has to be able to steam the compressed data over that usb port and have a processor capable of decompressing and playing the file.
This, IMHO, is a basic requirement, if it can't do that then....

Gave it a second shot tonight. Formatted a hard drive as fat32 and used a USB adaptor to plug it into the device. Now I can see the movies on the drive.  The files I tested were divx movies. They started to play but it wasn't smooth, it was like watching a movies at only 15 fps instead of 30, motion was jerky. I tried to fast forward the movie and then it lost sync, badly. All the movies were the same.

You may be right, maybe it does have a good enough processor, maybe it is just the fact that the USB bus cannot stream data fast enough. But lets face it, if you're intending to use this device seriously there are only 2 options to store data, either on a USB hard drive or on a network. So far it looks like USB is out and there isn't any option yet to stream over a network.

So I guess it is up to the programmers to see if they can pull this one out of the fire.

Unpacked my OSD today and set it up ok. Here's what I found:
1. Plugged in my 160gb drive in a USB enclosure, the unit recognized the USB device but would not display any files or folders.
2. Plugged in a flash drive, it sees the files on this device. Tried opening a jpg, the unit goes black then reboots.
3. Tried to view an .avi file, device reads for a while then reboots.
4. Tried to playback a wmv file from the flash drive, it plays the sound but not the video.
5. Tried recording to the flash drive, both in economy and normal modes, both unwatchable. Playback on my PC of these files also unwatchable.

It has the latest firmware loaded but having used a lot of multimedia devices, mostly on computers with high and low end hardware, IMHO it is not going to matter how many firmware updates this thing gets it is just not powerful enough to be able to do what is required. To capture and playback video requires some power under the hood and from what I've seen so far this device does not have it.

Hopefully I'll be proved wrong. I will hang on to it long enough to see how the next firmware upgrades effect it, but at the moment the 60 day return policy is looking good.