Widening the analog hole

The entertainment industry embraced the digital revolution by making digital goods behave like analog ones. That is, scarce and hard to reproduce. It narrowed reproducibility of its "content" until all that remained was what it ironically called "the analog hole". Only through the analog hole could scarce-ified digital goods still be moved with relative ease, and without being stopped by the DRM police. The moved goods would not be of identical digital quality, but they risked looking and sounding good enough to please the user.

Naturally, user demand has turned the analog hole into a marketplace. Front and center there are products by Chicago-based Neuros, which loves Linux and works to bring the free and open Linux value system to the world of media production and reproduction.

The Neuros Recorder 2 is an MPEG 4 recorder that "works like a mini digital VCR". It connects to sources over RCA cables and records in real time on stanard removable flash memory cards. Content can be transfered to other devices manually or over a USB 2.0 connection.

The company's latest procduct is the Neuros OSD, "the first open source Linux-based embedded media center. It lets you record from cable, satellite TV, DVD, TiVo/DVR, camcorder or VCR over RCA or S-Video cables, and and to distribute or play back recordings over LAN (ethernet), memory card, USB or RCA cables. The architecture is wide open, and constantly improved by Neuros and a growing community of developers and users. The price is $229.

Check them out at neurostechnology.com.

- Doc Searls