Hack Your Media Player (1/2)
Neuros OSD Open Source Media Player
INTRODUCTION
While there are countless applications available to manage and view media on our computers and even some good portable solutions, getting our media to and from the television is still a challenging task for most. Neuros Technology decided to tackle this challenge in a new and exciting way. Their newest product, the Neuros OSD, is not only a media center and video recorder but is also based on Linux and has completely open source software and hardware. It's a product designed to be as versatile, open, and hackable as possible while still being easy enough to use for any living room. Whether you wish to covert your DVD's to digital files, record your favorite TV shows for your iPod, stream videos from your home network, or take it apart and rebuild it, the Neuros OSD is a low cost and versatile device that is on the forefront of the open source revolution. How did it perform? Read on for a thorough review!
WHAT'S HOT
The most appealing feature about the Neuros OSD has to be its versatility. Based on an embedded version of linux, the Neuros OSD supports the following.
Video Interface:
Video Recording:
Video Player:
Photo Viewer:
Audio Player:
Storage Card Compatibility:
Aside from the variety of supported formats and interfaces, the Neuros OSD is no stranger to the internet and finds itself new firmware updates as they become available. This means that nothing is set in stone and the unit's software capabilities may continue to grow as developers continue to work their magic.
SETUP
Setup of the Neuros OSD is pretty simple all around. The unit comes in a very nice box with all cables and batteries included.
(all images link to high resolution)
The high quality box in all its glory.
What you see once the box's magnet flap cover is opened.
Contents of the Neuros OSD Box. Almost everything needed to get started.
The universal remote included with the Neuros OSD (yes, batteries are included).
Front of the Neuros OSD. Pitch-black, small, and shiny.
Back from left to right: 5V power, serial development cable, IR blaster, S-video in, ethernet LAN, A/V out, A/V in.
Front from left to right: status LED, multi-card reader, CF card reader, USB port.
The Neuros OSD on its presentation stand.
The IR Blaster used to control a cable TV box for scheduled television recording.
The standard mini-AV to AV cables, one set used for recording input, one set for output.
Out of the box, the Neuros OSD contains everything needed to plug it in, turn it on, and see its menu on your television. The box advertises the OSD as not requiring a PC to use, which is true, but using the device alone with only what comes in the box will allow you to do little more then watch YouTube videos. To use the OSD's full capabilities, you're going to also need either an external USB hard drive, an SD, MMC, MS, or CF card, or a networked hard drive or computer to store and access files from.
Steps to set up the OSD are simple and obvious. The device must first be plugged into a wall outlet via the included power brick. One set of A/V cables are plugged into the output port of the OSD and then plugged into any television or anything with a standard RCA A/V input (the well known red, white, and yellow trio of plugs). The other set of A/V cables are plugged from the input port of the OSD to whatever device you which to record from, which could be anything with either an RCA A/V or Svideo output. This device could be a DVD player, cable box, digital cable box, VCR, or even a video camera. The wide usage of this RCA A/V connection as both and input and an output makes the OSD very versatile but unfortunately makes both the input and output run at standard definition. This may be a stopping point for many people who have invested in high-def home entertainment systems, but those of you who aren't as picky will be happy with the standard definition versatility of this device. Once you have it plugged in, powered up, and configured, you'll see the main menu.
Neuros OSD Main Menu on my widescreen LCD TV.
The remaining setup steps depend on how you plan to use the OSD. If you're going to be recording and playing back from an external USB hard drive, you can plug this in now. Any USB drive used with the device must be formatted to FAT32 and this must be done with a computer. The device cannot currently format drives but the Neuros Technology website contains formatting instructions for most operating systems. If you plan on recording to a removable media of your choice, whether it's a large compact flash or secure digital card, you can insert the card into the front of the OSD. Fortunately the OSD can also fully utilize networked computers or networked hard drives like NAS storage units. If this is your method of choice you'll need to plug the OSD into either a wired 10/100 port on your home ethernet network or possibly use a Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP Wireless-G MIMO Performance Ethernet Converter, which they state will be supported in Q4 2007.
The guided setup will greet you when you first turn on the device. This will allow you set up the networking and the IR blaster.
Guided setup welcome screen.
Guided setup network configuration.
Either use DHCP or configure a static IP address for the OSD.
Set up the IR blaster using the remote that came with your cable tuner box.
The OSD uses its IR port to learn your tuner remote commands.
Firmware updates are always encouraged, automatically searched for, and performed by the Neuros OSD.
PRODUCT FEATURES
The features of the Neuros OSD can be broken down into a few main uses. These uses are video, audio, photos, and recording. I'll cover each of these separately.
Video:
Using the Neuros OSD to view digital video will be its main use for most people. Whether it's video recorded from television, movies encoded from DVDs, or files downloaded from the internet, the OSD can easily handle the most common video codecs in use today. Some internet streaming favorites are Quicktime 6 and FLV format (otherwise known as Flash video) and everyone's favorite download formats DivX and Xvid. The one codec not supported that could be a problem for a few is H.264, which is Apple's newest advanced video codec commonly used by Mac users.
The home screen of the Neuros OSD is this main menu.
Playing a video is as easy as going to the Play-Browse, navigating to the video's location, and selecting the video to play.
Playing videos from a networked drive is equally simple. Selecting network instead of USB will search your network to find all available shares.
Once you select your share, it prompts you to authenticate if necessary. Once authenticated, you can stream any video from your networked computer, NAS, or network capable hard drive.
The Neuros OSD provides all the standard video playing options such as forward, rewind, and even bookmarking.
The OSD can be configured to play either a single file, all files in a folder, play them sequentially, or even randomly selected.
As a video player, the Neuros OSD is great. Aside from its standard definition shortcoming, the OSD will play a large variety of formats, play them from your network or external drive or flash drive, and the OSD will play them however you like. Random and sequential playing of videos within a folder is feature I've always wished for in Front Row on my Mac or an AppleTV, both of which play a single video and then return to the menu.
Audio:
The Neuros OSD is capable of playing MP3 and WMA files up to 320kbps, along with OGG Vorbis, FLAC, WAV and others. This should satisfy most people that rip music to their own computers. The downfall is that protected DRM'd files will not be playable by the OSD. This is to be expected due to the nature of DRM and can't be held against Neuros, but can be held against DRM. This means your purchased music, like those downloaded through the iTunes Music Store, will not be playable unless it's the "iTunes Plus" DRM-free variety. Audio on the Neuros OSD works similarly to video in that you can play audio files from whatever media the OSD supports including network shares. While the Neuros Technology website warns against playing from and recording directly to your iPod, iPhone, or iWhatever, it's possible that some hacking around may one day enable playing directly from your iPod. For the time being, I'd recommend playing directly from a USB drive, SD or CF card, or off your network.
Once you select Audio from the main menu, you'll have to enqueue music by selecting a file or folder with the OSD file selector.
Once it enqueues all the selected files, it will present a list of playable files.
Once you select an audio file, the OSD will begin playing while displaying any info it is able to read from the file tags.
The downside with the Neuros OSD audio player, in my opinion, is that it is basically just a player. It will play from a list of audio files, either sequentially or randomly, that's about it. If you have a super-large mp3 collection like I do, having a couple thousand mp3s in a list almost makes it unusable. You certainly won't be able to find a particular song you want in any reasonable time. There are no media browsing options like sorting by artist or album. You can basically enqueue a list of files, play them, and that's about it.
Photos:
The photo viewing capabilities of the Neuros OSD are limited to JPEG, BMP, and GIF formats. Most people wanting to put photos on their TV will most likely be going from a digital camera to their television. Since most current digital cameras JPEGs onto a media card supported by the OSD, there should be few compatibility problems. Unless you shoot RAW, of course.
Video showing how to view photos of the SD card out of a digital camera.
As the Neuros OSD reads a directory of images, it loads thumbnails for viewing. This can be very time consuming if you have large photos.
7 megapixel images took about 5 seconds to create each thumbnail.
Each photo can be viewed full screen or along with the filename information on the top.
The photo menu reveals the options to view thumbnails, single images, or a slideshow. There is also the option to play music along with the photos.
The Neuros OSD allows images to be zoomed in a couple levels while providing a zoom navigator at the bottom right.
Recording:
One of the main features of the Neuros OSD is the ability to record from a variety of other video devices. The main uses will either be recording your DVDs for backup or for playback on a portable device, or recording TV shows from a cable box. To record TV you'll obviously need a cable box, which is unfortunate for those of us who have TVs with a built in tuner. If you do have a tuner, the A/V output out from the cable box can be run directly into the OSD, then out into your TV. No extra cables will be needed. The OSD will not interfere with the tuner's interaction with the TV and will not degrade the quality. In fact, it seems that the OSD only modifies the signal from the input video to the output video when in the menu screens or when using an overlay, otherwise it seems that the video is passed directly through to the output. This idea is reinforced by the fact that even when off (power removed from the OSD) the video on the input is still displayed at the output.
Recording a DVD is an easy process with the OSD. The first step is to make sure you have a place to record onto. This could be a USB drive ,any supported media card, or even a network drive. Once that is available and your DVD player is plugged into the input of the OSD, it's ready to be recorded.
Placing a DVD in the drive will display the DVD menu behind the Neuros OSD menu so you know an input device is active.
Pressing the record button brings up a menu that lets you select a playback device. The playback device settings are TV, Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Smartphone, or advanced settings.
You can set the duration to the length of the movie or TV show or record for an unlimited length.
Next, select a location to record the file to.
Finally, press play on your DVD player and confirm the settings. Your DVD will play on your screen while the OSD transparently records it in the background. The status light on the front of the OSD will turn from green to amber, indicating that recording is in progress.
Scene recorded with iPod settings.
Scene recorded with PSP settings.
Scene recorded with Smartphone settings.
Scene recorded with TV settings.
Recording the above 30 minute clips produced the following file sizes: iPod = 347MB, PSP = 363MB, Smartphone = 200MB, TV = 463MB. While the quality isn't exactly comparable to that of a video encoded directly from a DVD in a computer, the Neuros OSD does its best to be self sufficient and do without the computer. The OSD can record at a maximum resolution of 672x448, maximum bitrate of 2500 kbps, and a maximum framerate of 30 frames per second.
Neuros OSD advanced recording settings.
Once the duration set for the recording is over or the recording is stopped manually, the OSD finishes up the recording. The recorded video can then be accessed though the video menu. The other ability of the Neuros OSD is to schedule a recording. This is mainly good for recording scheduled television shows. To perform a scheduled recording of a TV show, you must first have your cable box plugged into the input of the OSD. You'll also need the IR blaster positioned in front of the IR port of the cable box and programmed with the cable box remote.
Once the cable box and IR blaster are all set up, select "Schedule a Recording" from the video menu.
Select the record settings, record location, start time, repeat frequency, channel (if any) and record length.
The scheduled recording list shows everything you have scheduled. From here you can modify and delete scheduled recordings.
Once the scheduled time arrives, the IR blaster will change your cable box to whatever station you defined in the schedule settings. It will then record for the set duration to the set location. Now this isn't as smooth as a digital video recorder with a built-in tuner. The Neuros OSD basically uses the IR blaster to imitate the cable box remote and change the channel, meaning a few things could go wrong. If the cable box is off, it won't be able to change the station. If for some reason there is a misreading between the IR blaster and your cable box's IR receiver, it won't change the channel properly. This shouldn't happen if everything is set up properly, but misfires and misreading are possible due to the nature of IR.
Other Applications:
The Neuros OSD has a few extra features along with the ability to basically hack away at the system. The main additional application is a YouTube viewer that lets you search for videos and watch them on your TV.
The YouTube menu gives you access to favorites, video search, and other videos.
You can view newest videos, favorite videos, and the other common YouTube lists.
The results show you a list of videos you can watch.
Another interesting features of the Neuros OSD is the file browser that we used to select videos and photos above. It also has a whole hidden menu of useful tools.
Selecting a file and bringing up this menu with a specific key on the remote will allow you to copy, cut, paste, rename, or delete files. You can also create new folders, map directories, set wallpapers and even edit videos.
Editing a video recorded by the Neuros OSD is simple. Play through the video and find clips you want to keep. Pressing the down arrow will start and stop a clip. Clip through the video keeping only the good parts.
Once you are done clipping, you can save the clipped parts to a new movie file. This is ideal for removing commercials from TV shows you want to archive.
The Advanced Application menu shows new programs that are being developed and aren't quite ready yet.
One such application is the OSD Console, which lets you interact directly with the embedded Linux subsystem.
This Linux interaction can also be achieved by telnetting directly in the OSD over the network.
Finally the "Coming Soon" menu, which gives a description of useful features that might soon be coming to the Neuros OSD. When these features do finally become available, they will only be an automated firmware update away.
Since hacking is encouraged with the Neuros OSD, I couldn't help but to open it up. Quickly glancing at the top you can see the heart of the OSD, a DM320 chip developed by TI. This is basically an ARM processor core married to a TI DSP core. The ARM core runs around 200 MHz while the DSP core runs at about 120 MHz. The ARM part of this chip allows for the general processor usage by the embedded Linux operating system, while the DSP part handles much of the signal processing that takes place in a device such as this.
The bottom side isn't nearly as interesting, showing only a few ports and many wire traces.
To most people eyeing the Neuros OSD, being able to freely open it up won't mean very much. But for the eager hacker, the complete schematics available on the Neuros Technology website means a world of possibilities. Perhaps this device would make a good in-car media system? Maybe it can be hacked to work with a touch screen? Being a computer engineer myself, I certainly plan to have some fun with it.
