This update that its almost impossible to really appreciate if you haven't been a part of Neuros for a while. After years of teeth gnashing about the read only file system and and lack a package manager fully implemented, a new community member bmc has released software that solves these issues called OSDng.

More good news from TI. From the open platforms principal architect:

"TI is continuing to make our devices more and more open. In addition to the low-cost C64x+ DSP tools, open source DSP Link, and open source Codec Engine, plus configuration tool, the DM6446 VICP is now usable by everyone via the VICP Signal Processing Library

The VICP is a collection of loosely coupled accelerators attached to the C64x+ DSP within the DM6446. The VICP signal processing library provides a simple way of programming these accelerators to provide additional DSP performance within your system. "

If you are wondering why this is big news, its because these tools allow outside developers unprecedented access to the power of TI's DSP, essentially unlocking the power of a chip that's has a price performance ratio that few others can match. The Davinci 6446 chip is about the size of a dime, can do real time high definition video encoding, has such low power consumption it can operate without even a heat sink and using battery power. These chips essentially are bringing laptop type performance to handhelds (or silent set-top devices). For more information, see my youtube intro of the OSD2 dev kit.

For discussion, see the mailing list thread and TI's community site

Following up on the successful Introduction to Crowd Narration and Crowd Narration of the First US Presidential Debate, tonight Neuros will host crowd narration for the First US Vice-Presidential Debate tonight, 17:00 Eastern/16:00 Central.

To actually watch the chat text superimposed on the video, you'll need an OSD but all you'll need to participate is a web browser (and access to the debate broadcast)

To participate on the web: go to narration.neuros.tv where you'll find a familiar chat window, where the input from that window will be directly superimposed on those watching through their OSDs (per the instructions below)

Instructions for OSD owners below the break

You may recall we posted about Crowd Narration previously. That's the technology that allows two lines of chat commentary to be superimposed over whatever show or televised event you are watching. Now we're putting that technology to use with the inaugural event on the first US presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain.

To actually watch the chat text superimposed on the video, you'll need an OSD but all you'll need to participate is a web browser (and access to the debate broadcast)

To participate on the web: go to narration.neuros.tv where you'll find a familiar chat window, where the input from that window will be directly superimposed on those watching through their OSDs (per the instructions below)

If you're like me, you went into this election year with high hopes about the level of debate we'd see in this campaign, and I think we've all been disappointed as the debate has degenerated into the usual sound bites and attack ads. Perhaps with direct citizen participation, we can help to raise the level of the discussion to the level we had originally hoped for. Please come join us as we fact check, debate and discuss in real time right along with the candidates themselves.

Instructions for OSD owners below

Building on the promise of the Neuros OSD, the high definition Neuros OSD 2.0 developer kits, developed in collaboration with Texas Instruments (TI) is now on sale at the Neuros Store . The goal of the OSD2 is to do to the TV what the IBM PC (and the like) did to computers, namely to provide an open set-top device for TV applications. Simply put, without an open computing device, there would have been no PC killer apps. Without an open video recorder, there can be no TV killer apps.

The OSD2 is an open video recorder that's capable of high def video recording from virtually any source and playback in a variety of formats. Using TI's DaVinci DM 6446 chipset, the Neuros OSD 2.0 will offer the first truly open embedded video recording device. “TI's support for this initiative represents a significant milestone, not just for Open Internet Television Platforms, but open electronics generally,” said Mark Denissen, vice president, Worldwide Strategic Marketing, Texas Instruments .

If you're like me, your first reaction to hearing that the web is available on your TV is "why?" The answer is quite a bit different than you might think. The answer is not that you want you want your TV to go out to the web to browse content, which is by and large not the most inspiring concept. The answer is that you want web content brought to your TV. In other words, the Web and all the interactive web 2.0 tools are tools that are well suited to bring rich content to your TV.

Ravenexus Summer of Code project is a great example. Check out this video capture of it in action and you'll quickly understand that the point of the web browser is not "browsing the web" per se, but as a tool that allows all kinds of participation in an integrated TV experience that hasn't existed before. Wiki information populating information about shows and artists is just the beginning. Links to shared favorities, community feedback, etc are all vastly more realistic when the tools to bring them are webtools rather than the typically embedded morass.

Neuros hacker Guillaumebel has been hard at work on integrating last.fm and he's been diligently documenting his progress on the last.fm wiki page. Here are instructions to try the Beta. Besides the fact that I'm personally a big fan of the last.fm service, two things really excite me about this application. As the tag line suggests, last.fm really is a quiet revolution in the way that we experience music. Virtually anyone that's used last.fm knows it's a vastly more compelling way to listen to music than traditional fm or even satellite radio. It's interactive, learns what you like, enables music sharing, is powered by fellow users, and ad free. It represents another break from the traditional centralized taste-makers and further increases the power of us listeners, and it provides real protection against some of corrupting influences of money in the industry. Its long been a great pc application, but in need of support on a device to bring it to more living rooms.

The second thing that's exciting about this application is how it beautifully illustrates the power of free/open source software integrating new functionality in a device. Look at item five on the Xi menu as an example, it's a feature that will search and fetch the associated music video from YouTube (or some other online video source). In the future, you can imagine that the customizable Xi menu could search your local collection and other services for "music from this artist" as well as share that music with friends, etc. The simple Xi menu is the result of many contributions, from many projects, XMMS2, a youtube browser, etc. What's key is all that functionality is seamlessly integrated into one familiar media playing interface, meaning it allows one handed operation and works with the simplicity users expect of their electronics.

Neuros and MediaFly are jointly sponsoring a contract to integrate the Mediafly Media Channel service into the Neuros OSD. This bounty pays $2,000 on full completion, as described below. If you are interested in applying, send an email to bounties at neurostechnology.com and describe your level of experience in a few sentences.

I wanted to post a quick capture of a photo browser that CRWeb ported from the Qt apps to the OSD2. It needs optimization, but it shows the promise of Qt, and something like this could form the basis for a lot of our browsing via cover art, thumbnails, etc.

In CRWeb's words:
"it is actually not well written, but it gets a point across, I will actually end up switching it to this from the same author, better written, also, performance will increase when I place it inside the layout instead of full screen. I intend to make use of it for a special navigation mode in any app that works with icons/thumbnails (like Youtube)"

In a recent exciting update on the mailing list, Matthias Hardt outlines the progress they've made in getting directfb, and the disko framework running on the Neuros OSD. Check out morphine.tv to see what their software is capable of.