At MTekk we normally focus on PDA – and especially Pocket PC Phone / Smartphone – products. Every so often, though, we get the opportunity to review more general IT related products, as well as having reviews submitted to us. In this case, our friends at Press Digital sent the Neuston to us for review, and I’ve had quite a bit of fun with it!

The Neuston Virtuoso MC 500 is an interesting little device. It comes with a 10/100 Ethernet, PCMCIA, USB, and an array of multimedia outputs to suit your home entertainment needs.

Home entertainment? Well, I class it as that, but it could also have valid corporate and retail uses. You see, the Neuston could best be described as a facilitator of multimedia. Movies, music, still images – even web browsing – are all taken in their stride.

It does so by virtue of a network connection to a PC running the Neuston Media Center. Files you wish to access via the Neuston are stored on your PC, and the device communicates via TCP/IP to obtain file catalogues and to stream the media itself.

I tested the Neuston for several weeks, and it even accompanied me on my house move between Sydney and Canberra. Having plugged it back in now, I don’t want to let it go back!

Installation

The Neuston is all too easy to setup initially, depending upon your existing home entertainment arrangement. Unpacking the unit itself, remote control, and power supply takes a matter of seconds; connecting to your TV using the supplied component output (RCA) cables, and connecting to your LAN using the supplied 10/100 CAT5 Ethernet cable, can be done in no time whatsoever.

The Neuston will happily use DHCP to obtain an IP address, and it will in turn connect to PC with a DHCP assigned address - although in both cases a reserved DHCP address or a static IP may well be preferable. In my case, I had a DHCP server already in place, and the Neuston was happy to take whatever address was dished out. The PC running Neuston Media Centre was assigned a static IP address.

In addition to 10/100 Ethernet, he Neuston also supports Wi-Fi via the included PCMCIA slot. Support for cards is extremely limited – more on this later – but if you’re lucky enough to have a supported card and a stable 802.11b/g network, you can use this (and indeed, this is what I have done for the most part).

The Neuston also supports USB, for connection of USB keys and the like. This obviates the need for a PC connection, although it’s certainly a more expensive way to play back your MP3s than using your existing PC.

I only briefly tested connection of a USB key, but it appeared to work quite happily. I’m told that USB hard drives are able to work well with this functionality, so it’s quite possible to make massive amounts of data available without needing a PC connection at all.

In addition to the component (RCA) output cables, the Neuston also supports S-Video output, Digital Video output, and coax or fibre optic for connection to a Surround Sound system.

The Neuston Media Centre comes on a CD, but I found I had issues with the version supplied on my Windows XP system. Downloading an updated version from the support website rectified the problems, and it seems it’s advisable to check for the latest version regularly. Installation of NMC was relatively simple and uneventful, requiring a reboot to operate.

NMC runs a streaming media server on your PC, allowing the Neuston MC500 to connect to it whenever it is running. As it’s opening a port on your machine, you need to be aware of this and appropriately configure your software firewall (if installed) to permit it to open the port for the local network – but preferably not the Internet!

Turning your Neuston on and switching your TV to A/V input should present you with the Neuston screen. The first screen – other than the initial “Neuston” splash – is the screen for selecting the PC running Neuston Media Center. It’s this that gives the Neuston some interesting flexibility, since you can select from a list of PC’s with NMC installed  – allowing for you to pick and choose how you operate, and perhaps even letting you make optimal use of your available storage..

Assuming you have installed NMC on your PC, you will see a green icon next to your PC name if it has been added to the available device list and can be connected. If the icon is red, no connection could be made to your PC.

If your PC hasn’t been added, simply make sure the NMC component is installed and running on your PC, then choose “Add”.

Having made the connection between your Neuston and your PC, you can now browse your Videos, Music, Photos, and Internet Radio – but if you haven’t got any media as yet, or reconfigured the NMC to look in a different folder for the files, you won’t have anything to play as yet.

The Neuston interface is relatively easy to get the hang of – but of course I’ve dealt with similar interfaces before. Accessing the (i) button on the remote control allows you to access the web browser component, as well as Setup, which has fairly limited options but is essential to setup Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi

This part needs a separate section to discuss. It’s actually one of the weaker points of the Neuston, and one which will hopefully be rectified in the near future.

The Neuston Virtuoso MC500 comes with a PCMCIA slot which is devoted entirely to the installation of Wi-Fi cards. This could, in theory, give you a great home entertainment system which is devoid of wires between your PC and TV. In practice, however, the theory isn’t so great at present.

The firmware of this device supports only a very few Wi-Fi cards; and all of them 802.11b. For streaming media, I’m not so sure that sub-11Mbps speeds will always be entirely sufficient (especially if it has to fall-back), and would have preferred to see at least a few 802.11a, 802.11g, and perhaps even some dual-band (802.11a/b/g) cards in the list.

As it is, the list of supported cards appears to be composed entirely – or almost – of obsoleted cards. It so happens that I actually had one of the supported cards – the Intel Pro/2011b – which is old and, in my experience, not terribly reliable.

I tried to get a little clever with this and, seeing a Netgear card on the list, shot down to Harris Technologies and bought the current 802.11b card from Netgear. No luck, however – it must be the specific model quoted to work.

Our friends at Press Digital have been talking to the manufacturer about this issue, and we’ll hopefully see some current model 802.11a and 802.11g cards added in the near future.

In the meantime, I went back to the Intel Pro 2011b. It was nowhere near straightforward to get it connected properly, and in fact WEP appeared to have a problem on the Neuston. The only way I could get the device to connect to my LAN via Wi-Fi was to setup my 802.11b/g network as follows:

WEP: 128 Bit
Authentication: Open (not the usual Shared)

As far as I can tell, these settings mean that I have a WEP key entered, but don’t require it. Fortunately my access point has restrictions on which Mac address could be connect, no sensitive data flows across the 802.11b network, and my one other 802.11b device, the Netgear MA701 (used on my XDA II) could accept these settings and continue to operate. However, I very much doubt the security of the solution.

To be fair, this could simply be a quirk of my access point combined with the Intel card… but obtaining another card to test this would be difficult to say the least given the limited support.

The Neuston’s remote control does not easily lend itself to entry of a long WEP key, and I found that having to do this each time I change WEP settings quickly become tiresome and annoying. I should mention that there is an optional keyboard, but availability seems to be a problem.

Investing in a wireless bridge might go a long way to rectifying these concerns, taking the Wi-Fi operation out of the Neuston’s hands. It’s a shame to let that PCMCIA slot go to waste though.

Operation

For me, operation over Wi-Fi was initially woeful. When I could get a good connection – and connection over the 2.4ghz range has been a long standing problem in my house, which is why I normally use 802.11a (5ghz)  – video was slow and jerky, and image slideshows would stop every so often.

MP3 performance fared better, but each time my Wi-Fi connection dropped, I’d have to start again from the beginning in all cases.

Having eventually had enough of the 802.11b connectivity, I ran a Cat5 Ethernet cable of suitable length back to my access point for a wired connection – and achieved an instant fix of most issues.

The Neuston itself doesn’t really seem to do much in the way of caching, meaning that what you stream over the network is played almost as soon as it’s received. An inbuilt cache could perhaps have achieved better performance over Wi-Fi, but I blame primarily the limited card support and lack of faster options (eg. 802.11a and g) for most Wi-Fi issues I had.

When I recently moved back to Sydney, I took advantage of the move to change the layout of my network, and especially the wireless component. Nowadays, my access point actually sits in the lounge room behind our chairs, and I’ve been able to test some large videos – mainly trailers – on the Neuston with significantly less issues and much better performance.

The actual operation, once you have a reliable connection, is quite excellent. You can play videos windowed or full screen – and both 4:3 and 16:9 ratios are available, while MP3’s and photos can be shuffled, played in order, and even used as backgrounds to one another… meaning that photo slideshows can utilize your MP3’s (played in order, unfortunately) as background music, and MP3’s can use your photos to display (again, played in order).

Sound reproduction seems excellent, and while I elected not to connect it to my surround sound system (since I didn’t really have anything encoded for surround sound in any case), I’m certain that the quality will be superb, as was the stereo sound I achieved.

Other Functionality

The Neuston is effectively a Linux based device with a web browser interface. The web browser itself can be used to browse websites, although I found that it wasn’t really that well suited to rendering web pages for current standards. Needless to say, the remote control supplied is also not well suited to entering URLs, and browsing would not be a frequently used capability. The optional keyboard might go some way to rectifying this, but I’d say a browser upgrade would be needed to really make use of this functionality.

I was interested in the Internet Radio capabilities of the device,, but had issues getting this working. A recent update to the NMC has addressed some Internet Radio issues, and this perhaps might rectify these – I didn’t have a chance to test it though.

Other functionality, such as “Web Bookmark”, “Web Directory”, and “News” – all reliant on the Internet capabilities of the Neuston – either had issues in operation.

I’d honestly have to say that to me, none of the Internet capabilities of the product are exactly compelling product features; nice to have, but not essential.

Compatibility

Compatibility with various video encoding formats and file types is perhaps not as strong as I would have liked. While the majority of MPG and AVI files I had  would play happily, some MPEG videos that I had needed to be converted to other formats before they would play, and some formats such as Quicktime are completely unsupported. On the plus side, however, the Neuston does support DiVX encoded AVI files, and is able to convert them on the fly to a supported codec. Given the popularity of DiVX, this is a definite positive.

I found little to no issues with the MP3 functionality, and in fact didn’t find an MP3 that couldn’t be played. Likewise, the device seemed quite at home with GIF and JPG photos, and I enjoyed being able to put slideshows of my family photos on the television while playing a selection of favourite tunes.

Overall

If I had an issue with the Neuston, it would perhaps be that it’s not an easy device to fit into a particular slot. It’s an MP3 player, it’s a video player, it’s a photo album, and it’s a web browser. And it can connect to your TV / entertainment system in a myriad of ways. And it can take USB keys.  Oh, and don’t forget Internet radio. Ooh, and wireless too.

Perhaps it tries to do a little too much, and as a result, misses out on some improvements that could be made by focusing on specific features. Perhaps if it was designed to be good at purely video and music, with more solid compatibility and performance, I’d be less hesitant to heap a high score on it.

In many ways, I keep finding myself wondering why it doesn’t include a DVD player. I have a DVD player anyway, but somehow I felt that the Neuston could have benefited from this inclusion.

I guess what my issue comes down to is that, in looking at a device like this, I try to find a compelling reason for me to use it; and I do struggle with the Neuston. Typically if I want to watch a video, I’ll pop down to the video store and hire a DVD, or choose one from my collection. If the Neuston included a DVD player, I’d use it in preference to my existing DVD player, since it has far superior connection capabilities to my home entertainment system. I don’t really want to spend ages (and disk space) encoding my existing DVD collection to video files, and indeed I don’t really have much time for doing so.

My ideal would be a system which accommodates both worlds, so that if I do happen to encode a video, or I want to play my MP3 collection, or even do a photo album, I could do so – but if I just want to stick in a DVD, I have that choice.

If the system could also be used to pickup and record free-to-air TV to hard disk, that too would be welcome and, in fact, would make the Neuston even more useful and provide more compelling reasons to use it. The Neuston doesn’t do that, and the closest it comes to allowing media input is the USB functionality – which admittedly could be quite generous given the capacity of some USB hard drives out there. Besides which, copyright issues abound here, and it’s highly unlikely to be workable in the litigious society of today.

I gather a DVD version will become available, which is terrific. I wouldn’t expect to see it natively able to rip DVD’s – copyright issues aplenty – but for an all-in-one entertainment center I could see myself willing to outlay the money. For those who already have a DVD player, though, I think the MC500 will be the way to go.

All that being said though, I can definitely see its potential for business usage. The flexibility of the Neuston would make for some truly impressive presentations that incorporate v ideo, images, and music, and this perhaps could be the best market for the device. In fact, if they could incorporate a Powerpoint viewer to the device and make it more portable, it would be fantastic for the salesman on the move; as it is though, it would more than likely make a valuable addition to many board rooms and meeting spaces – especially if the wireless capasbilities can be improved to support current cards.

I could also see the value of Neuston running as part of a kiosk, looping informational videos, photos, and music; the Wi-Fi capabilities again could be highly useful in this regard.

All in all, I rather like the Neuston. I wish it had more bells and whistles to complete the package, but it works and works well – so long as you can sort out the Wi-Fi either with a compatible card or a wireless bridge, or are willing to have an Ethernet cable run across your entertainment room. You could forgo all that, though, and plug in a USB hard drive. Hey – what can I say? It’s definitely flexible!

Neuston Virtuoso MC500 Overall Score

Good: Flexible connectivity Plenty of options to integrate your existing home entertainment system Web browsing, video, music, and still images in one unit Looks good, and shouldn't stick out like a sore thumb Good quality video and sound, with support for wide screen ratios USB capabilities mean you can forgo a network connection altogether

Bad: Compatibility with Wi-Fi cards; consider a wireless bridge if you don't have a compatible card The Web browser could you an update in terms of supported standards I wish it had DVD! Compatibility with various video formats could stand to be expanded; consider investing in a video conversion application to ensure your ability to play!

Matt's Score : 7 / 10