RELEASE NOTES: OSD 3.33-2.07-02.857 (05/09/08)

IMPORTANT: You cannot simply upgrade to this release. Please check the current version of firmware you are running by navigating to Settings and Properties. If the version begins with 3.33-1.74 or lower, you MUST upgrade to 3.33-1.75-02.849 first!

This release requires that you maintain a 128MB or larger CompactFlash card within the CF slot of your Neuros OSD. If a CF card did not come with your OSD for this purpose, you can request one here.

Porting open, patent free codecs to our devices has always been of great interest to neuros and many of our users. As some of you Neuros old timers may recall, we were the first to port the Ogg Vorbis audio codec to a portable HDD audio player. Now it's time, hopefully, to do the same with the Ogg Theora video codec. This project is exciting to me, not just because it will allow us to support another codec, but because will put hackers directly in contact with technical resources and personnel at TI. Marcello Guedes is actually being mentored by a TI engineer, Jason Kridner and supported by TI with equipment, etc. If we can be successful in this project, I believe it will only further open TI's eyes about the potential and effectiveness of community development.

See the evolving theora wiki page for more information.

This is pretty self explanatory, and pretty cool. If you don't know last.fm then click on the link and check it out. It's a really cool social way to experience music based on a personal recommendation system based on people with like tastes. It's hard to fully appreciate until you've experienced it, and as far as I know, the OSD would be the first device outside of the PC to support it, so this could be an opportunity to bring social interactive radio to the couch so to speak.

We have a last.fm project wiki page thanks to Guillaumebel and thanks Anders for mentoring. Make us proud, I know there are many in the Neuros community that are very much hoping the OSD can become a great net audio streaming device.

Standing on the shoulders of Neuros Giant srobertson is another exciting project sponsored from our friends at Google, the nTube! Browser by Fcheslack and mentored by our own crweb

This is a really significant project IMHO, because browsing internet video is a really rich area for Neuros and creating an API that can really open up that world to a set-top box, is right in the sweet spot of what Neuros is focused on. It's great project, and one I personally hope to participate in (primarily by standing around asking idiotic questions that everyone rolls their eyes at- it's my special skill)

Google officially approved 4 project slots for Neuros this year.
The final projects list can be found at:
the neuros google summer of code page

I'm going to post about each of them here, starting with the web browser:
You've heard mention of a web browser here before, but now it's an official Google Summer of Code project, awarded to Ravenexus and it has a wiki page

Press Release: For release April 21, 2008

Neuros, in partnership with Texas Instruments, is pleased to announce the creation of a new bounty program for its Open Internet Television HDPlatform. Patterned off Neuros’ previous successes with community bounties and the Google Summer of Code Program, TI and Neuros have partnered to support the free software developer community with a six month phased program that will release a host of bounties to build and optimize this new platform.

If you're interested in what the out of box experience for an uber user is, check out James Hart's ic:blog . Immediately after installing, he's quickly up to date on all the latest hacks from MattJ and Mgschwan . I haven't even posted here on those hacks, but James has already installed them.

Netgear has launched a community site, MyOpenRouter and they are looking for hackers. From Android, Ubuntu Mobile, to TI's support of FOSS and now Netgear, I really see 2008 as a kind of tipping point for open source hardware. Netgear's success in this area can further help to demonstrate that FOSS is not only good for product development, but is a big consumer benefit too. Please join us in welcoming Netgear to the open hardware fold and, please visit the Neuros hacker welcome page to MyOpenRouter

I posted about the migration to Qt in a previous post and now it's finally here

Now we need some screen shots and you need a CF card to upgrade if you don't already have one. Qt is a really big step forward for the OSD and for Neuros generally. In our evolution, we have become more and more open in every sense of the word and the Qt migration (though it's taken us months to complete) is one of the most exciting developments in that continuing evolution. If you don't know Qt, it is a well established, mature open source gui toolkits with variants powering desktops and used for writing applications on both embedded devices and PCs. Here's one sample tutorial on Qt would is a good start for C++ programmers not familiar with the tool, but there's documentation galore all over the web.

Despite some initial hiccups (if you are on the list, we apologize..), the revised Neuros Developer Mailing List, hosted on Google Groups, has been updated.

All email to the previous developer mailing list, Neuros-DM320Hardware@googlegroups.com, should now be directed to neuros@googlegroups.com. You can visit the group here: http://groups.google.com/group/neuros

Nero's email below explains why we are making this move, and provides more details on the transition.