Today Neuros announced the availability of developer kits for their new HD recorder, the OSD 2.0, which can record 720p video via HDMI and component input. At 10″ x 10″ x 2″ and $250/each, this box looks to be a promising candidate for a cheap, portable recorder that you could carry to every gig, something that I’ve been looking forward to. You can check out the full specs here. These are developer kits, not retail units, so we’ll have to wait and see whether this will deliver on its specs. Ed.: I will say, Neuros has done a great job in the past. -PK
Pros:
- HD recording on the cheap.
- User-installed 3.5″ HDD so, unlike previous Neuros devices, you’re not stuck recording to SD cards and you can swap in a new drive when needed.
- 1080i upscaling on output.
- Smaller than a laptop and easy to bring along.
- Wide variety of playback codecs supported, including RTSP, so one could conceivably play back live streams over the Internets via the Ethernet port.
- Cheap!
- Hackable! These boxes are meant to be user-pwned to the nth degree, unlike practically every other DVR on the market.
Cons:
- No video pass-through support and the SD and HD outputs will be mutually exclusive, which means you’ll have to have bring along a DA, too.
- No on-screen display might make it difficult to start the recorder and *know* that it’s on.
- No HDMI input.
Unknowns:
- Recording quality. The specs say “up to 720p/XGA (1024×768) MPEG4 encoding + AAC/AC3/MP3 encoding” and “up to D1(720×480) H.264 encoding + AAC/AC3/MP3 encoding”. I look forward to seeing some sample recordings.
- Just what one can run on its embedded Linux OS. It would be pretty cool if you could fire up PureData on there.
Open set-top box ships [Linux Devices]
Neuros Technology, makers of open source video goodness
Ed.: Note that if you don’t need HD and want something much smaller, Neuros’ OSD remains interesting as an alternative; you can just hook it up to your mixer, etc. Anyone doing that, in fact? -PK
Update: Wait a second… 720p != 1024×768, which I forgot to mention until vade’s comment reminded me. What gives? Where did the marketing department get those 256 pixels from?