Is a cute standard-def networkable playback/recording device.
It's open-source, and (mostly) open-hardware. It was opened to the development community along the lines of the OLPC.
I recently (May 2009) purchased a Neuros OSD, and have tinkered with it a bit to improve things.
Below is info supporting my contributions back to the OSD open-source development community.
For a fairly complete list, see ChangeLog.
View a slideshow of the update procedure, and some of the OSDng configuration menus, at:
If you find OSDng has breathed life back into this excellent piece of hardware that has been largely abandoned by the manufacturer, please support this effort with a small donation.
You do not need to have a paypal account to use the above, despite PayPal making the credit-card option smaller and easy to miss. After clicking through the donate button, look for “Don't have a PayPal account?” on the lower left, and click the Continue link nearby.
If you care to, please add a comment to your donation telling me:
WARNING The below is currently designed/tested for use on an OSD 1.0 (the version with a CF slot), on a network-connected OSD that is already running Arizona.
We'll be using the monolithic “upk” updater one last time to get you to my OSDng (“OSD next generation”) release. After that, you'll have a fully modifiable system with package management, for much easier customization.
If you're not already running Arizona, make sure you're on a recent enough pre-Arizona release (3.33-1.77-02.879) to bootstrap through their upk-based Arizona-like release. Lots more information on completing this step is on Neuros' site. See the “getting to arizona” link in the “reference info” for more info if you need it.
Once you're ready for an arizona-like update:
Once it's done, you will boot into an “OSDng-ready” environment.
You will have the youtube fix and the mushy keys fix in place, as well as a bunch of other utilities - but still a read-only root filesystem.
To upgrade to a full OSDng, go into the new OSDng menu you'll find, and choose “setup”. Follow the prompts to bootstrap yourself into a fully configurable, modifiable, tweakable OSDng distribution running off of your CF card or USB drive.
CF is much faster than the USB on the OSD.
There is a bug in their kernel drivers that results in deadlock when using SD cards for root
Yes, Arizona and OSDng can coexist on the same card.
Yes.
If you installed on USB, just boot without the USB plugged in.
If you have a CF card that shares OSDng and Arizona: once you've installed OSDng, your LED will flash green/red for three seconds when it starts up. During this time, press the “Home” key on your remote. Then press enter. It will then boot from the flash rootfs.
For both USB and CF, you can also disable OSDng by renaming (or removing) the OSDng folder from your external card. There's now a menu option to toggle OSDng being enabled on any given card.
Yes. Just copy the “OSDng” folder to your new CF or USB storage, and it'll boot from that. You can move from CF→USB, USB→CF, FAT32→ext2, ext2→FAT, etc. It doesn't care.
There's now a menu option to help you migrate from one media card to another.
The media can be as large as you want (I've got a 8GB USB working fine). The OSDng storage will max out at 2GB under Windows/FAT formats. Theoretically ext2 could house OSDng storage up to 2TB, but I'd conservatively say 2GB would be a safe max there too until someone checks to make sure there are no large-file problems in the OSD's kernel loopback or ext2 code. You really don't want your root filesystem that large anyway. Just make the OSDng storage big enough to tweak the system, and you can use the rest of the space on the card holding it for media files or other stuff. For obscenely large media files you should really consider a NAS anyway.
You need about 22mb.
20mb for the read-only (cramfs) portion of the root file system. 1mb as a minimal read-write overlay (ext2/mini_fo) 1mb to emulate the "settings" area (/mnt/OSD aka /dev/mtd5)
Change your language setting to “English”. Do this even if your menus currently appear to be in English (Neuros LLC only had translated as far as French and Chinese - all other languages will appear to be english, but have their own language specific Root menus that don't include OSDng).
Once you have OSDng installed, and update to the latest version (>=2.55), you can switch back to another language - OSDng now appears in all languages' root menus.
The next upk release will work around this language-specific problem.
Coming soon…
Should work fine now. I've reconfigured the webserver to send the proper mime-type for upk and ipk files, which Safari is more sensitive to than Firefox and other browsers.