Neuros OSD: the goods.
As I was away at the cabin from Friday until Sunday I didn't really have much opportunity to play with my Neuros OSD, so Sunday afternoon became my nerdy playground.
Hooking up the unit was relatively easy, as I mentioned in a previous post, except for the fact that my MTS cable box (a Motorola RG2200, I believe) was talking to the TV via coaxial cable, and my DVD player and GameCube used the two RCA jacks.
The Neuros OSD accepts only RCA and S-Video; it ships with two sets of RCA connectors but not an S-Video cable (though this doesn't seem too out of the ordinary). So I needed to figure out a way to re-wire things.
I took the RCA out directly from the MTS Box and ran it through the Neuros OSD and then connected the Neuros to the RCA in on the TV This initially left the GameCube out of the loop, but I figured I'd worry about it later.
Of course, for those in the know this means that my digital signal from the MTS Box is converted to analogue and then the Neuros encodes it again for recording. Some people may be bugged by this, but since everything I was watching was analogue as soon as it left the MTS Box I don't see any difference.
Plugging in the Neuros OSD's power and plugging in an ethernet cable, I was instantly rewarded with the start-up screen and then the Neuros menu over-laying the live TV images. I set-up the network (basically told it to grab a dynamic IP address) and then downloaded the firmware update. All proceeded well.
I had a left-over 256meg CF Card from my previous digital camera, so I decided to plug that in and try it out. The Neuros seems to support at least 3 different formats of memory card (plus it sports a USB socket), so it seems quite flexible in that regard. If I had network shares set-up I could tell it to save to those instead... but I'm a tad lazy.
With the on-screen controls I was able to do the one-touch recording, timed recording, and play-back with-out having to really think about it at all. I could stream YouTube videos directly to my TV from the 'net with-out issue. I dropped a few different short clips from my PC onto the flash card and plugged it back in... it played the avi, mpeg, and wmv files perfectly fine.
Now, the big trick was to get the Neuros to play nice with the MTS box... not much good having a timed recording feature if you have to be there to turn the channel. I could set the MTS box to auto-tune, and then set the Neuros to record at the same time, but that's two separate set-ups and not really what I was looking for.
The Neuros OSD also comes with an IR blaster (as well as a serial connector in the event you either want to telnet into the OSD or control it via a TIVO or some other cable-box that supports serial connections), so setting that up was the next bit.
Looking at the manual for the MTS Box, I immediately noticed that there was already an IR blaster plug on the back... so I could set the MTS Box to auto-record and it would send the command to the Neuros. The Neuros apparently responds to "standard" SONY VCR IR commands. But all good ideas eventually come across a problem, and in this case it was the MTS IR Blaster socket. It was twice the size of the plug for the IR Blaster I received with my Neuros. Okay... so I couldn't do it that way... I'd need to reverse the connect.
I plugged the IR Blaster into the Neuros and put the emitter over the MTS Box receiver. Going into the Neuros set-up, it has a "wizard" that will walk you through programming the Neuros to control what-ever is at the other end of the IR Blaster. "Cool!", I though.
The training simple says "Press '0' on your original remote". I pressed "0". Nothing happened. I pressed it again. And again. No response. Obviously the Neuros wasn't picking anything up. Which was odd, as I was using the Neuros remote before.
But... then I recalled something. There are little "rabbit ears" on each out-going co-axial cable from the MTS box. It dawned on me. The remote is using UHF, and not IR. But wait... there was an IR receptor on the MTS box. This bore more research!
Doing a little digging I found that the MTS remotes can use either UHF or IR, but if the remote isn't in the room with the MTS box, it *must* use UHF... which totally makes sense. Of course, the instructions also made it sound like if you had more than 1 TV on the box, you are required to use UHF. Luckily, this seems to be poor wording.
I reprogrammed the primary MTS remote to use IR and tried the process again. The Neuros went through the steps of getting me to teach it what each keypad number's signal looked like, and then the "select/enter" key. After that, the Neuros could auto-tune the MTS box. Everything seemed to work perfectly!
The Neuros remote control is also a universal remote, so I was also able to ditch my TV remote altogether... though I still need the MTS remote for some of the special commands such as the TV guide and what-not. But right now I seem to have everything working at least as good as expected.
I still think the best set-up is to have the MTS box do all the programmed recording, just so it isn't quite as fiddly with having to input the time and channel, but I'm really pleased how easy the Neuros is to use. The MTS set-up was more difficult than anything else.
Now, to get more bang for my buck I should figure out if I'm going to set up a removable USB hard-drive for storage, or if I should shim another drive into my basement server. The server drive seems to make the most sense (also from a cosmetic POV), but that also means re-visiting my firewall rules, which seem to prohibit SMB and NFS on my network!
Considering it is snowing today, the weather may be implying that there will be more inside-time to come!
Hooking up the unit was relatively easy, as I mentioned in a previous post, except for the fact that my MTS cable box (a Motorola RG2200, I believe) was talking to the TV via coaxial cable, and my DVD player and GameCube used the two RCA jacks.
The Neuros OSD accepts only RCA and S-Video; it ships with two sets of RCA connectors but not an S-Video cable (though this doesn't seem too out of the ordinary). So I needed to figure out a way to re-wire things.
I took the RCA out directly from the MTS Box and ran it through the Neuros OSD and then connected the Neuros to the RCA in on the TV This initially left the GameCube out of the loop, but I figured I'd worry about it later.
Of course, for those in the know this means that my digital signal from the MTS Box is converted to analogue and then the Neuros encodes it again for recording. Some people may be bugged by this, but since everything I was watching was analogue as soon as it left the MTS Box I don't see any difference.
Plugging in the Neuros OSD's power and plugging in an ethernet cable, I was instantly rewarded with the start-up screen and then the Neuros menu over-laying the live TV images. I set-up the network (basically told it to grab a dynamic IP address) and then downloaded the firmware update. All proceeded well.
I had a left-over 256meg CF Card from my previous digital camera, so I decided to plug that in and try it out. The Neuros seems to support at least 3 different formats of memory card (plus it sports a USB socket), so it seems quite flexible in that regard. If I had network shares set-up I could tell it to save to those instead... but I'm a tad lazy.
With the on-screen controls I was able to do the one-touch recording, timed recording, and play-back with-out having to really think about it at all. I could stream YouTube videos directly to my TV from the 'net with-out issue. I dropped a few different short clips from my PC onto the flash card and plugged it back in... it played the avi, mpeg, and wmv files perfectly fine.
Now, the big trick was to get the Neuros to play nice with the MTS box... not much good having a timed recording feature if you have to be there to turn the channel. I could set the MTS box to auto-tune, and then set the Neuros to record at the same time, but that's two separate set-ups and not really what I was looking for.
The Neuros OSD also comes with an IR blaster (as well as a serial connector in the event you either want to telnet into the OSD or control it via a TIVO or some other cable-box that supports serial connections), so setting that up was the next bit.
Looking at the manual for the MTS Box, I immediately noticed that there was already an IR blaster plug on the back... so I could set the MTS Box to auto-record and it would send the command to the Neuros. The Neuros apparently responds to "standard" SONY VCR IR commands. But all good ideas eventually come across a problem, and in this case it was the MTS IR Blaster socket. It was twice the size of the plug for the IR Blaster I received with my Neuros. Okay... so I couldn't do it that way... I'd need to reverse the connect.
I plugged the IR Blaster into the Neuros and put the emitter over the MTS Box receiver. Going into the Neuros set-up, it has a "wizard" that will walk you through programming the Neuros to control what-ever is at the other end of the IR Blaster. "Cool!", I though.
The training simple says "Press '0' on your original remote". I pressed "0". Nothing happened. I pressed it again. And again. No response. Obviously the Neuros wasn't picking anything up. Which was odd, as I was using the Neuros remote before.
But... then I recalled something. There are little "rabbit ears" on each out-going co-axial cable from the MTS box. It dawned on me. The remote is using UHF, and not IR. But wait... there was an IR receptor on the MTS box. This bore more research!
Doing a little digging I found that the MTS remotes can use either UHF or IR, but if the remote isn't in the room with the MTS box, it *must* use UHF... which totally makes sense. Of course, the instructions also made it sound like if you had more than 1 TV on the box, you are required to use UHF. Luckily, this seems to be poor wording.
I reprogrammed the primary MTS remote to use IR and tried the process again. The Neuros went through the steps of getting me to teach it what each keypad number's signal looked like, and then the "select/enter" key. After that, the Neuros could auto-tune the MTS box. Everything seemed to work perfectly!
The Neuros remote control is also a universal remote, so I was also able to ditch my TV remote altogether... though I still need the MTS remote for some of the special commands such as the TV guide and what-not. But right now I seem to have everything working at least as good as expected.
I still think the best set-up is to have the MTS box do all the programmed recording, just so it isn't quite as fiddly with having to input the time and channel, but I'm really pleased how easy the Neuros is to use. The MTS set-up was more difficult than anything else.
Now, to get more bang for my buck I should figure out if I'm going to set up a removable USB hard-drive for storage, or if I should shim another drive into my basement server. The server drive seems to make the most sense (also from a cosmetic POV), but that also means re-visiting my firewall rules, which seem to prohibit SMB and NFS on my network!
Considering it is snowing today, the weather may be implying that there will be more inside-time to come!