In the search for the Holy Grail of media management and distribution around the home, we've stumbled across the Neuros OSD. It's a small black box that, at least on paper, promises to offer a massive range of solutions to digital media problems.

The Neuros connects to your television and can play back digitally encoded media such as movies, music and photos from any attached USB storage device, memory card or - when connected to a network - streamed from your PC's hard drive. Not only this, you'll find you can also record any A/V source, be it a signal from a television, DVD player, VCR or anything with SCART or composite A/V out, so it's a great way to build a collection of digital video.

Content can be recorded to any attached storage or even directly to your PC's hard drive across a network. In addition to all of this you can use the supplied IR blaster to remotely control IR-driven devices from your PC, allowing you to set up schedules for recording and change channels or adjust settings from afar.

All of this sounds great, and there are few devices around that offer this combination of features, but it's obviously important that the Neuros performs, so we put it through a stringent series of tests to gauge exactly how effectively it pulls everything together.

When you unpack the device from the box you might be surprised at how light it is. It's fairly sleek and stylish, finished in piano black, and genuinely feels like it's empty, which does make you wonder if they could have crammed some internal storage inside or at least reduced the size somewhat.

You won't find any particularly modern connectivity here, although you are provided with everything you need to get started in the box. Two composite A/V to 3.5mm jack cables and two SCART to composite adaptors connect to the A/V in and A/V out ports on the Neuros, which when connected properly acts as a pass-through device so it'll sit quietly between your television and source without interfering with normal operation.

Aside from this you'll find inputs for the IR-blaster - a cable which sits next to the IR-receiver on any source device to allow you to control it remotely - an S-video port for alternative video input and an Ethernet port for wired network access. Although there is no wireless access supplied, you can purchase a wireless bridge separately that will offer this functionality.

When everything is up and running correctly you'll find that when operating the supplied remote control the main menu overlays the current television signal, allowing you access to each of the features without interrupting viewing, which is a nice touch. From here you can choose to view video, audio or photos, set up a network and access applications such as YouTube video.

The Neuros project is totally open source, boasting an expanding community of developers and users that contributes a significant amount to the improvement and refinement of the OSD. For this reason you can expect a wide range of additional plug-ins to become available, as well as regular firmware updates to correct problems as they are found. Previous models of the device weren't able to play Xvid encoded video for example, and where these earlier incarnations were aimed more at the stereotypical 'geek', Neuros is claiming that developments in this latest model are intended to make it more accessible to a wider market.

Unfortunately we don't think they've quite nailed, at least not yet. While the features and functions of the device work well enough on a basic level, we had a number of issues that threatened to ruin the experience. To begin with the interface is very basic and not particularly well laid out. There is a 'getting started' help screen that will guide you through some of the features, which certainly helps a bit, but we can see many users being a little intimidated by the range of options available.

Things aren't helped in the slightest by the poor remote control, which feels very cheap and is shockingly unresponsive, leaving us repeatedly re-aligning the OSD and leaning further and further forwards until it picked up the signal.

We also had network access and shared folder problems which proved tricky to resolve, although refinements are in progress at the time of writing to clear this up for most users. You'll also find that the degree of control on offer when playing back media such as video and audio is quite poor, with no aspect ratio adjustment and limited playlist control. Currently you can only save video to MP4 format, and notably there's no support for high-definition resolutions so in its current guise it probably won't have a long shelf life.

There are some very nice touches however, such as the ability to record directly to a specific format, such as PSP, iPod or the maximum resolution for your TV, so it's a great way to build a media library to play back on portable devices. The YouTube streaming eventually worked well too, and we were pretty impressed by the general media support for different formats and codecs.

The Neuros OSD's greatest strength is that it can be improved and upgraded extremely easily. In fact during the course of our review a new firmware update was provided which offered faster access to YouTube content, some of which would previously cause the device to crash. For these reasons it's likely to become a popular community-driven device for a fairly niche market.

Perhaps, given enough time and feedback, Neuros will iron out the cracks, provide a new remote control, improve the processor to handle HD content, add an HDMI port and some internal storage, slim the thing down and include built-in wireless access. If and when this all happens we'll really be talking business. It certainly has the potential to get there, and we'll be keeping a sharp eye on improvements and upgrades as they appear, to see if it does.

Neuros has produced an intriguing and wildly adaptable device in the OSD, which combines many of the most appealing features of conventional media streamers with media access hardware such as the Slingbox. Sadly, at least in its current guise, we had a few too many problems with usability and media management to recommend it over devices like the Archos 605 with DV-station, but we'll certainly be keeping an eye on its development.