I have some for Manchester 🙂

I came across the fact that The Sex Pistols are touring in November purely by chance and that all of the tickets for the shows had been sold in 15 minutes, so they announced 2 more shows with tickets to go on sale 2 days later. I set an alarm for 5 minutes before they went on sale and managed to bag some. Woo!

Of course I will have to slightly overlook the fact that we are all swallowing our punk credentials by being old, fat and doing it for the money, but as this might be the last chance I get to see them play live, I’ll have to live with that. And that fact that I’ve just screwed my finances for the month will have to go down as a worthwhile hardship.

I just wish I had been able to see The Clash play before Joe Strummer died.

Recently I reviewed the Neuros OSD in LUG Radio Season 5, Episode 1 and I was barraged with questions almost as soon as I started so I didn’t get to say half of the things I wanted to and also, I didn’t give an entirely fair representation of the OSD, given that I hadn’t had much chance to try it out, so here is a further review.

The most important thing I missed out was that the OSD can record and encode from pretty much any source, digital/analogue/cable/satellite TV, DVD, VCR etc. If you don’t use the same plug as the US then you’re going to need an adapter. If you live in a PAL area, which is most of Europe, South Asia and most of Africa (apart from much of west Africa) then you need to change the signalling to PAL, as it comes as NTSC by default.

I’m running the latest beta firmware as of 30/09/2007. I use European date format and so should you. Europe invented the rest of the world remember 😉

On LUG Radio I said that it either didn’t play my media at all or that playback was jerky, further testing show that it plays around 80% of my movies and video files without a problem. In fact, after a firmware update, a few files which suffered from jerky playback now play properly, though some still don’t. AVI files worked best, WMVs played audio but no video, Ogg Theora video isn’t supported, though Ogg Vorbis audio is, say 8 out of 10 of my FLV video splayed ok and my single MP4 file didn’t play at all. Yes I know there’s a whole lot more to a codec than the file extension. For codec playback quality, you’re best off reading this page.

So far the problems as I see it are:

• Jerky playback on around 15% of video files, quite a few people complain about this on the forums and most seem to say it improved with newer firmware, browse the forums for this one. Neuros invite people to send them clips that don’t play well. I also have clips that didn’t play at all. This seems to be an issue with decoding rather than either hardware performance or network bandwidth so far as I can tell. I am copying video files to my USB hard disk as we speak for a playback comparison.
• No audio track support that I can find. I have a film where Spanish is the default language and I can’t change to the English audio. I haven’t tried movies which use subtitles.
• No support for DVD menus I don’t think though I did get them to play by using the ‘next file’ type button.
• Playback on multi-file movies (ie DVD files on a hard disk) didn’t work well for me when forwarding or rewinding across the files. They seemed to keep playing from the beginning of each file or starting from the beginning of the previous file and they lost audio sync.
• The remote control seems very hit and miss, you have to put it in the right position, like with a TV set top aerial, for it to work.
• I seemed to get occasional hangs where the thing tried to open a file and it didn’t start playing.

I haven’t tried recording yet.

I hope to update my blog when I have worked out how to fix some of these issues.On the other hand, when playback worked, it was fine. The audio player was fine and the Youtube viewer was great even though it is marked as beta status. Your can get a shell either using the beta application via the TV screen, using the serial console with the supplied cable or telnet. SMB browsing worked fine, although it’s hard work using the remote to key in your username and password and NFS worked fine too, although it’s recommended to use it in TCP mode and it wasn’t picked up automatically, I had to do it via the console (I have this problem on my Linux machines too, so I’m not sure if NFS can be ‘detected’ in the same way that SMB can, or whether I just don’t have it set up).

I believe they are hoping to release a new Neuros next year which will include wireless support and maybe local storage, but I might be making that up, so don’t believe me, read the Neuros website.

For now, I’d say that if you want a device which works almost flawlessly either wait for the issues I have outlined to be fixed or consider that it’s not for you. If you’re happy, like me, to support people making devices that do things the way you want them (ie no DRM, no hardware or software tie in) and you understand that there are problems to resolved which you will have to spend talking to the developers and on the forums to get resolved, then maybe this is for you. Mine cost around £100, at a special LUG Radio Live discounted rate.

My feature request forum post is here.

UPDATE: It seems FLV video is supported, I appear to have been playing the same 1 or 2 bad FLVs each time I tested. Also it was suggested on the forums that DVD playback, including that of DVDs that have been shrunk to below 4.7GB is beyond the hardware of the OSD, which is a shame, but I guess I can rip them down to 700MB AVIs or something.

The new season of LUG Radio, my first as permanent presenter, starts on Monday 24th September 2007. That’s Season 5, Episode 1 in 3 days from now 🙂

Go listen.

A colleague of mine just told me of his encounter with Virgin Media tech support yesterday evening. He’s on cable broadband and we need him to have a static IP address to be able to access certain work facilities, so he phoned them up.

It took an hour and a half for Virgin Media’s broadband tech support, including supervisors, to conclude that they didn’t know whether he had a static or dynamic IP address, or if he was dynamic, how he could get a static IP address from them.

They also told him that if he needed to transfer some files from home to work and back then he should just copy them on to a CD and take them with him. This wasn’t a failing of their system in being able to tell them, they just didn’t know what their addressing scheme was or which was provided by which product in their range.

Now let’s not forget, call centre staff are mostly poorly trained and badly treated by their employers and their customer alike, so let’s not shoot them for it, but somebody should at least train them in the benefits of their different packages and whether a certain product provides a dynamic or static IP address. This is supposed to be technical support.

Personally, I found that shocking, so I thought I’d tell everyone. Every service provider in the world has it’s proportion of dissatisfied customers, so remember, don’t shoot the call centre staff, shoot the policy makers and please don’t take this as an opprtunity to make my blog a focal point for venting your spleen about service providers 🙂

UPDATE: In a second call to Virgin Media broadband support, at 75p per minute, my colleague was bounced around from department to department again, before finally being put on to someone who knew about this sort of thing who told him that you can’t statically address connections (and by connection, I assume they mean a cable broadband end-point) otherwise the Internet wouldn’t work. Shocking.

After talking with the Neuros guy, Joe Born, at LUG Radio Live 2007, I decided to buy a Neuros OSD at a special LRL discount of £100 including delivery from the US (you need to know the magic code…). I ordered it on Friday and it arrived today. Now that’s service.

The Neuros OSD is essentially a networked audio/visual device, which plays your music and video files and displays your photos from any number of sources, be it across a network using NFS or Samba, from a removable disk over USB and Firewire, from compact flash, SD, MMC and memory stick. It also records and encodes incoming signals from TV, DVD, DVD, PVR, cable, satellite, camcorder etc. The ability to browse and play videos from Youtube was announced in June.

This sounds like a bargain to me. Think Apple TV without the price tag. Admittedly, it doesn’t have built in storage or wireless (though it can allegedly use a USB wireless dongle), it relies on your having USB, Firewire or networked storage but this suits me to the ground. I don’t like my media stored all over the place, I would rather keep it on my desktop and pull it over on demand; and I’d rather do that over 100 Mb ethernet than wireless.

For me, this box just does what I want and a little more. I don’t buy in to the Apple/iPod suite of applications, devices and wallet taxing (Apple announced $200 price cuts on the iPhone today, 2 months after release, in a move which looks a lot like shafting it’s hardcore fans with an early adopters tax). Yes I could have bought a hard disk PVR for a little more, maybe a lot more I don’t know, but this device is small and it means I don’t have to carry a PC from the computer room to the bedroom any more. I also means I don’t have to try to work out why the soundcard isn’t outputting sound to the TV or why the picture from the TV out on my PC is sometimes grey and fuzzy on the TV regardless of OS, resolution or colour depth. And it has a remote control, so no more carrying a keybord to login and mouse to click stuff with.

And another thing. It runs Linux and there is a bustling development community adding new features to the built in software, which you can upgrade at any time you choose, or you can set it to upgrade automatically so you get the latest features at your convenience. It fits in with my recent thought that I should support devices I believe are doing the right thing for their users, or at least are running Linux. I bought a GP2X for the same reason, though admittedly it’s gathering dust since a week after I bought it because I can’t play half of the games I want to without a keyboard or a better controller. There is no DRM here to determine what media I can play on my device or what I can do with media I play on my device like with the iPod, the Zune, and probably the Apple TV. It’s my media, my way.

I’m delighted with this at the moment, but admittedly I haven’t turned it on yet as I’m at work and it cam with a US power adapter, so I’ll have to buy a converter or find a power adapter with the right size plug, ampage and voltage.

Whether this kit is ready for the non-technical user, I’m not sure, but for technical people this is great. Maybe it is if you know how about file sharing and IP addresses or USB disks.

I’ll tell you more when I get the thing turned on.