I finally had a chance to spend some quality time with Neuros' Mpeg4 Video Recorder 2. The tiny device is designed to record something straight off your television, VCR, computer, what have you, directly to your Memory Stick in a format the Playstation Portable can show.
Set-up was fairly easy. The thing comes with two set's of cables, one in and one out, and you basically just run the signal of whatever you want to record straight through the device.

I connected the VR2 with my cable box. The only downside with this setting is that everything you watch on the TV goes through the device. While there didn't seem to be any quality degredation or time lapse, it did cause some heartache when my son accidentally tinkered with the remote while I was away from home.

When you turn the device on a menu pops up on the television. The menu has six options to choose from: Pictures, Music, Movies, Record, Settings and File Browsing.

The Pictures, Music and Movies options let you view or listen to media from your card on TV, a neat option, but one I doubt I would use that often.

File browsing allows you to move the content on your Memory Stick around, which is a nice bonus feature. You can also delete records from the stick with it.

If you hop into the Settings menu you can choose between PAL or NTSC, very cool. You can also use this option to upgrade the devices firmware, but you will have had to load the file on the Memory Stick first.

The most important option in the menu is Record. This is where you go to start recording on the fly or set up timed recordings. You also use this menu to select your record quality.

Before I started recording, I went into the sub-menu and checked out the quality options. You can change the resolution to QVGA, WQVGA or TV VGA. The TV VGA ends up putting the recording in a submenu on your Memory Stick that your PSP can't access, but the other two work just fine.

You can also change the quality setting, choosing between Normal or Economic.

This menu also lets you set how long you want a recording to go, if you're not going to be around for the entire show. You can choose between one, two or three hour recordings.

If you plan ahead, the VR2 also lets you create programs with start and end times and dates. You can even set them up for daily or weekly recordings. The only downside of the VR2 is that it can't change channels, so you need to make sure you have the cable box on the right channel when it starts recording. Fortunately, my cable box also has the option of automatically changing channels to watch shows. So I was able to record different channels at different times without being around.

The device can put about two hours of shows on a 1GB stick in normal mode and four hours in economic mode.

I did my first test recording of a one hour show in normal mode.I plugged the Memory Stick into the device, switched to the proper channel and then hit the record button on the VR2 remote.

An hour later I came back (I didn't bother setting the timer the first time), stopped the recording, slid the stick out and popped it into the PSP. Within seconds I was watching the show on the portable. Very nice.

The video looked great on the PSP's screen and there were no hang-up's at all.

The next time, I tried the economic mode and used the time to start a recording later in the day. The recording came off without a hitch and funny enough, I didn t notice a ton of quality loss dropping down to economic.

The one bad thing I noticed about the device is that if I moved the cable around, it actually could cause the picture and sound to get very nasty. I'm not sure if the problem was in the cables or the device itself, but that's certainly not a good sign for the quality of something.

Of course, I don't see myself jiggering this thing around much once its found a home. In fact, after installing it, I never had to move it and as long as it was sitting still there were not problems.
All in all, I'd say this tiny $150 device (which can also record on CF cards) is well worth the money for PSP owners who want to be able to take a little television with them on the go.

The device feels a bit on the cheap side, and the static issue worried me a bit, but those were the only real downsides.

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