Neuros Whips Old Media into Shape

Still looking at that pile of VHS tapes on the shelf? Something we've all wanted is a Swiss Army knife for working with our ever-growing media collection. Whatever media you have, there's probably a way to move it, translate it, or do whatever you want with it. But what we don't have is a universal tool that does it all, or at least does a whole lot of things and with little effort. That's where the Neuros fills a niche. We just looked at the Neuros here at CES 2008 and were impressed by its ability to slurp in just about any media that you have using standard RCA connectors, digitize it, and finally store it wherever you choose.

The Neuros OSD is a $200 black box about the size of a router. If you have a DVD collection, family movies on VHS or Hi-8, or anything that outputs video to an RCA connector, then you can probably handle it with the Neuros OSD. Actually, the fact that the Neuros uses the almost-obsolete RCA connector for input is both its strength and its weakness—a strength because a whole of lot of media, and most all of the older media that you're most anxious to archive, has an RCA output, but a weakness because the Neuros starts with analog video, which is an old standard hobbled by the limitations of the past. But once the Neuros grabs the video, it digitizes it to MPEG format and stores it wherever you choose. And on the output side, Neuros is as up to date as the candidates are on their poll numbers. Neuros can output the expected—USB drives, cell phones, and iPods—and then network attached storage.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Neuros is that it is an open source project, which means that its software code is publicly available. That means there's at least the possibility that public-spirited developers will contribute fixes and patches. As a consumer, this shouldn't really matter, because what you want is a solid functioning system, but it is interesting to see new software paradigms being used to develop mainstream products.

The bottom line is that for "old" media, the Neuros is a flexible way to digitize and archive it. The Neuros doesn't support a wireless connection, nor does it support high definition, but if you've got shelves full of old media to transfer to the digital world, this might do the trick.