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A quick look at the Neuros OSD

by Brad Linder, posted Jul 13th 2007 1:00PM

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Hardware
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After months as sort of a hacker's dream, Neuros is ready to push the Neuros OSD multimedia hub/recorder to the general public. The Linux-based device is sort of a cross between an AppleTV, TiVo, and the company's older MPEG-4 recorder.

It's questionable whether this jack-of-all-trades masters any feature better than its competitors. But since it's open source, new features and refinements are coming online all the time. For example, Neuros recently added YouTube browsing and viewing to the OSD. It's currently considered a beta feature, but Neuros hopes to drop the beta label within a few weeks.

More photos and features after the jump.

As you can see, the interface for browsing YouTube videos isn't particularly attractive when compared with the AppleTV interface. But YouTube browsing is still a work in progress.

In order to search YouTube, you have to enter text using your remote control. Right now, the OSD brings up a cellphone-like interface, letting you enter text by pressing buttons. By the time YouTube browsing exits beta, you'll see a more typical interface that lets you use the arrow buttons on your remote to select letters from the screen.

Here are a few other beta features that are coming soon. Anyone with a Neuros OSD can try out these beta applications, but as the next photo shows, you'll want to proceed with caution.

Oh, one last cool thing. While earlier Neuros products recorded only to flash cards, the OSD features USB support. So while it does not ship with a hard drive, you can attach an external drive. It's not quite as pretty as an all-in-one solution, but it's much more flexible.