The unit is very small measuring just 118 x 87 x 18mm decked out in a sleek looking black and silver design, it maintains its waif like figure by ditching a hard disk and instead relying on 2 memory card slots, one for CF cards and one for Sony's MS Duo format. The rear of the Neuros has a socket for the supplied 5 volt power adaptor and then simple AV in and AV out connections which when combined with the plethora of breakout leads in the packaging mean you can get a video source into the recorder and display the out on your TV.

Perhaps this display on a TV is what seems to mislead most people? the Neuros is not a TV PVR, when you connect up to a large TFT style TV this is immediately apparent with the relatively poor video resolution and on screen graphics, this is only a guide or operators screen. The video we are going to capture is purely saved on the memory cards ready for transfer via a PC or Mac onto a portable device.

Our first task was the get the whole thing set-up which sounded simple but started to prove a little tricky. The only way of interacting with the fairly lifeless recorder is via the remote, which has to have one of the worst designed battery covers known to mankind, talk about fiddly. After working out we had a flat battery and finding a replacement we were finally able to control the Neuros GUI on our TV screen and start to see what was possible.

The basic role for the Neuros is to capture the video it is fed via the AV input as MPEG-4 files onto the removable media, they don't supply any cards which means that the unit is not ready to use out of the box and if you are going to buy a card then 512mb must be the entry level for a video device. The on screen controls let you set up the basics like time and date, on screen language and the disk you want to use, in our case a 1gb CF card.

Recording is relatively simple and there is a one button push using the remote control to start the process running, record rates are limited with the highest resolution being VGA  640 x 480 at 30 FPS. However for use on the PSP we used 352 x 240 pixels and superfine mode producing a 1536kbps bit rate. The results look poor on the TV playing back through the box, but push those files to a portable device like an Archos PMP or a Sony PSP and the results are quite watchable. The audio quality does however leave a lot to be desired and seems to be limited to 32kbps through the G.726 codec, this makes the audio on sections of movies we encoded sounds as if its a telephone conversation.

Further playing with the Neuros settings allowed us to perform some timed recordings which reminded us of when we owned a VHS recorder, but in the days of Sky+ this did seem a little backwards. You can of course playback the video and also audio files on the NVR but the experience is rather poor with either limited resolution on Video or poor audio quality even on MP3 files. The picture viewer took perfectly good images and made the people in them look like the stay puff marsh mellow man. However when we took the encoded video and pushed it on to the Sony PSP we had borrowed for the review it actually looks pretty good.

The resolution is more than adequate for the PSP's screen and in superfine the images looked crisp and very professional, sadly the audio is still that 32kbps mono telephone call quality which does ruin the idea of encoding and watching a movie.

Overall the Neuros did do what it promised to do and that's get MPEG-4 onto a Sony PSP, now many software packages can also achieve the same but they do need a high powered PC and may not run in real-time. The Neuros Video Recorder on the other hand can encode real-time and produce watchable results on a Sony PSP and for around £140. It's not perfect and we'd have preferred something with a small hard drive and better audio codecs for encoding, but right now it does the job, give it a few months however and Neuros will have to sharpen up their act.

Published - 14/05/2006

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