Neuros OSD

I've had the Neuros OSD for about a week now. I needed a way of moving videos from my PVR to more durable storage. My PVR, with a 200 GB hard disk, fills up very quickly, mainly because a high proportion of the storage eaten up by files I keep indefinitely.

After a bit of research, I found a solution to my problem with the Neuros OSD Media Center.

I like the fact that its software is written in Linux and that it's open source, therefore hackable by the community. The manufacturers expect the community to add features and improve it - although, frankly, it's not all that relevant. At the time of writing the machine works, but it certainly needs more features and polish.

I use the Neuros OSD to export videos from my PVR, which doesn't allow me to move video via a USB port, to an external disk. This means that I receive digital content via satellite, record it in transport stream format on hard disk - no loss of quality so far. I start losing quality when I play out the analogue signal, in composite format (the Neuros has a S-VHS input as well, but I have to sort out this connection) and record it to hard disk. The Neuros encodes the video in MPEG4, at different resolutions, from iPod (320x240) to full SD (640x480). It cannot handle HD video.

The signal looks OK on an SD TV set and good on an iPod - and that's good enough for me. Don't expect stunning quality from video which has transited through an analogue input and undergone MPEG4 compression.

I attached a 500 GB hard disk to the Neuros OSD - that should give me app. 500 hours of video storage - lots of space for the documentaries and other video I want to keep for a while.

More information, including specs, on the Neuros website and once I've have the chance to use it for a while longer.