NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 FOR FREE
NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 SERIAL NUMBER
NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 PORTABLE
NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 SOFTWARE
NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 PC

Once a video file has been entirely received on your computer – not when it’s partially or mostly finished – it’s converted to iPod format in the background by a desktop tray application called TiVo Server, which chugs along file by file until your specified conversion queue is entirely finished. The next step in the process is wholly automated. When you click on the Start Transfer button, files begin to transfer from the TiVo box to your computer, a process that will take roughly a minute or more per minute of the show if you’ve recorded on medium-grade recording quality, more or less depending on whether you’ve used less or more aggressive video compression. Then, from the program’s main window, you click on the “Pick Recordings to Transfer” button (below), which calls up a list of programs on your TiVo box, and lets you select them individually or en masse.

NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 PORTABLE

On a positive note, using Desktop Plus is very simple: after you’ve gone into its Preferences menu (above) and told the program to “Convert to portable media device format,” you’ll want to choose MPEG-4-compatible devices and click OK.

NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 FOR FREE

This competes with a program from TV Harmony called AutoPilot, which does much of what Desktop Plus offers, only for free – and better.

NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 SERIAL NUMBER

To that end, TiVo has released a $25 TiVo Desktop upgrade called TiVo Desktop Plus – it’s actually just a serial number to unlock a conversion utility already built into TiVo Desktop. You’ll need a few “not in the box” items to do this: a wired or wireless USB network adapter ($20-50), an Ethernet cable or wireless networking hardware, and conversion software.

NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 PC

Consequently, it’s not enough to record a video on your TiVo and just connect an iPod to one of its USB ports: you need to transfer the video from TiVo to a Windows XP or 2000 PC using a free program called TiVo Desktop, then use the PC to convert it into an iPod-ready format.

TiVo’s boxes have only two problems: their processors are fairly slow, and based on the older MPEG-2 format, rather than iPod-compatible MPEG-4.

Using a highly intuitive program guide with an integrated smart search engine, they record your chosen videos onto a hard drive and display them on a home TV.

NEUROS MPEG RECORDER 2 SOFTWARE

The latest to come on board is TiVo, maker of what we feel to be the best standalone digital video recorders we’ve seen – these boxes are a few steps above a Neuros Recorder with EyeTV 2 software inside. A time-consuming, but user involvement-free conversion process is required after the original recording has finished. By comparison, Elgato Systems’ $200-and-up Eye TV 2 solutions (iLounge rating: B) do a very impressive job of recording TV shows and include a great program guide that makes the process easy, but requires that you leave a Mac computer on during recording, and doesn’t save videos directly into iPod-compatible formats. But in execution, the Recorder 2’s old VCR-like interface and recording limitations are far below what today’s consumers expect, and recordings are on the grainy side. In concept, Neuros has the best solution with the $150 MPEG-4 Recorder 2 (iLounge rating: C), a standalone hardware box that records TV shows that can be played back on TVs, iPods, and other MPEG-4 devices such as computers. Several companies have tackled this challenge from different angles, none as well as we would have liked. We catalogued all of the current alternatives in our most recent Free iPod Book, but as we’ve noted, an ideal solution for TV viewers would be to have a single smart device that records videos in a format that can instantly be watched on TVs or transferred to iPods.

Since Apple introduced the fifth-generation iPod (“with video”) last year, millions of prospective video watchers have been faced with a serious question: “how can I get videos to actually play on one of those?” There are two major obstacles: finding content (such as TV shows, music videos, and movies), and converting it into one of the iPod’s only two video formats (MPEG-4 and H.264).

Neuros mpeg recorder 2