While at CES, Matt Miller (aka The Mobile Gadgeteer) and I were invited to a private dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse with Neuros Audio. The evening’s star attraction was the then unreleased OSD, which turned out to be one of the most amazing video capture devices I have ever seen.

“The Neuros OSD will allow you to record, play, stream and share your video and audio content between all your electronic devices: your entertainment center (TV, stereo, DVD player, VCR, camcorder, etc), your PC/Internet and your portables (iPod, smartphones, PSP, etc).”

Yesterday a brand new Neuros showed up on my doorstep; this is its unboxing…

I have reviewed quite a few Neuros goodies in the past, and one of the things I most appreciate about the company is their commitment to open source. What this means is that there is a very active community of Neuros users who are constantly working on bettering the Neuros products’ interfaces - and Neuros completely encourages this! Pretty refreshing, wouldn’t you say?

According to their site, “The Neuros OSD already has some great features out-of-the-box, including the ability to record from virtually any video source (DVDs, cable/satellite TV, DVR-TiVo, camcorder, etc) to any memory card (SD, CF, etc) or USB device (iPod, PSP, external hard drives, etc). And with our linux-based open source operating system and considerable help from our worldwide community of users and developers, we’re continuously providing new features and benefits via free, downloadable firmware upgrades that you can install in minutes via the user interface. Some of the upgrade we are working on* include: watching YouTube on your TV, wireless networking, a full-featured audio player/recorder and much more… To see an up-to-date list of working features and current projects or to find out how to join our community, go to open.neurostechnology.com.”

According to Johan Abadie, my Neuros contact:

The price of the unit is $239.99 on our site.

The unit is already available online on Amazon, Buy.com, Newegg, J&R and many other sites, it will also be in CompUSA stores within the next 10 days (we shipped them the first units last week). We have not yet announced our first official firmware, but should do so by the end of the month (at least it is the plan), with a press release and all that good stuff. We have been working on a cooler split to allow 3d party applications to be run on the OSD. Although most non tech-savvy users will not see the difference, most developers and geeks will appreciate this new feature available on our next firmware release, as they will now be able to run many more applications on the device.

Clinton is going to take over the actual review of this item on Gear Diary, as he is one of the most traveled road warriors I know; he will put all of the OSD’s recording capabilities to good use.

Read the OSD’s FAQ here, or read the info page here.