Christmas shopping for a nerd is not easy.

Nikki has in recent years simply asked me what I wanted for Christmas, which works out well for me of course and makes her happy since she can give me what I actually want.  This year I asked her for a Neuros OSD (which I won’t link to, so that they won’t get any Google juice from this blog, har har), which lets you store movies on your home server and play them on your TV.  I was looking at this as basically a way to box up all of the DVDs that lie here and there around the house and still have them accessible when needed.  So, I did some research and found that the Neuros was a favourite device for the nerdy set.  Open source, DRM free, it had all of the right buzz to make it seem like the perfect device to get for my needs.

So needless to say I was more than a little disappointed when it arrived and it sucked.  It sucked hard in every way.  Let me explain:

1. Firmware updates.  This was one of the main reasons to get the thing; regular infusions of developer goodness to make the thing more useful all the time.  Well, the shipped device had an old firmware (to be expected) so I kicked off an update right away.  It failed spectacularly, resulted in a non-responsive hunk of plastic.  I had to go through an “emergency firmware upgrade” process.  That got the thing working again, but still it shouldn’t have been that hard to do, and that process would have been beyond most home users.

2. It was ugly.  The interface when I plugged it into my HDTV was blurry, pixelated crap.  Nikki suggested it looked like a Commodore 64, and she was right.  That was AFTER the update to the latest firmware, it was even worse out of the box.

3. Quality. The Neuros only plays Mpeg4 files, and only has RCA-type connections which means that in general, video looks like crap even when compared to a very cheap DVD player using the same type of cables.  We watched one movie on it and I kept noticing the pixels instead of the movie, which tells me that this thing is dead in the water for any real use.

4. Ease of use.  The firmware out of the box connected to my home server without any issue, but things quickly went downhill from there.  Once I updated to the newest firmware I could no longer browse to my server and connect.  In the end I had to telnet to the thing and edit up some files to mount the samba disk at boot up.  If the last sentence made any sense to you, congratulations you may be part of the target market for this device.  That got the thing back on the network, but even then the interface is clunky in the worst way, navigating files and folders on the disk instead of displaying any artwork, or even abstracting the Linux mount point in some useful way.  Instead, playing any file (video or audio) results in at least 6 (teeth-gnashing, laggy, frustratingly slow) remote button presses.  That’s far too many, if this thing really lets me “instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote”.  Um, no.  Fail.

It’s not what anyone would call user-friendly, and this especially became the deal-clincher.  I don’t have the time to be tech support for any other device in the house, I do that all day at work, and there’s more than enough to do already at home with all of the PCs, TVs and game consoles.  I don’t want a project to work on, I want something that works already.

I can’t believe how positive all of the reviews I read were.  I really couldn’t find a review that mentioned any of the bad stuff, but a closer troll through the company’s support forums would have revealed some cracks that would have kept me away if I had known.

Sigh.

This piece of crap is going back, and I’m buying an Apple TV.