Neuros OSD review

The Neuros OSD is built around a simple premise: copying videos should be easy.

Remember when you used to tape vinyl records onto cassettes? It's a pretty similar process. Plug in your video source (it supports S-Video, Scart and component video connections, which covers just about everything) and attach something digital to copy it onto. The memory card reader on the front takes SD, MMC, Memory Stick and CompactFlash, and the Neuros also supports many USB flash drives and portable hard disks. Meanwhile, it plugs into your TV to provide a display to use with its remote control.

Having set everything up and sorted out the ensuing tangle of wires, you press Play on your DVD player (or whatever you've plugged in), then press Record on the Neuros, and in the same amount of time it takes your film to play from start to finish, you get a digital copy of it in MP4 format. That's a lot faster than encoding with DivX, which takes many times the length of the film.

The resulting files don't look perfect, but it's important to remember that any quality sacrifices are compensated by ease of use. You can set the quality even lower to save disk space or ensure smooth playback on less powerful devices, such as PDAs. The inclusion of a PSP mode for Sony's handheld console is a plus. The files created are also compatible with iPods as well as other portable media players, and high definition content is catered for as long as your HD device will plug in, though you can't expect HD quality in the output.

The biggest problem with the Neuros is that its most obvious use - copying DVD movies to hard disk - isn't really even a legal grey area. It's a total no-no under current copyright legislation, even if you've paid for the DVD and only intend thecopy for your own use. Within the law, the main purpose for the OSD is digitising your home movies. If you do have a stack of VHS tapes or DVDs that you'd like to have on your PC or handheld, but can't face the hassle of importing them manually, the Neuros is convenient. It's not without its imperfections, but well worth a look.

Author: Dave Stevenson