To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
Eminent’s hdMEDIA RT EM7080 looks like a glossy black version of the old Apple TV. On the back, it has the usual HDMI, optical S/PDIF out, composite video, component video and stereo phono outputs. There’s also a USB B port for connecting it to your PC as an external storage device, plus two standard USB ports and an eSATA port for connecting external storage devices. The EM7080 also has room for a 3.5in SATA hard disk, which you can then use to turn your streamer into a NAS.
Fitting a disk is a bit fiddly and the instructions aren’t illustrated, but it didn’t take us too long to work out. However, the case provides no insulation, which means that both disk and fan are clearly audible. If you install a hard disk, you can format it from the Setup menu, but configuring the EM7080’s SMB server, BitTorrent and Usenet NZB clients requires you to log into its web interface via a browser.
The streamer has a surprisingly well laid out remote control with responsive and clearly labelled buttons. The main interface has a clean and simple column of text buttons running down the right hand side of the screen, with a large icon to illustrate each function on the left. Options include Movies, Music and Photo, each of which then allows you to browse internal storage, USB, NFS, Samba, UPnP or external DVD devices for appropriate content.
A Web Services menu provides access to YouTube, Shoutcast internet radio and video Metafeeds including video podcast directory MiroGuide, along with photos from Picasa and Flickr. The YouTube and Picasa apps don’t currently allow you to log in to your own account. A more serious YouTube issue means that, unless you have a hard disk installed or use Linux command line options to create a swap partition on a USB drive, videos are jerky at best. At worst, they wouldn’t play at all due to a lack of free memory to load them into, even after we installed a firmware designed to correct this known issue.
Like most modern streaming multimedia receivers, the EM7080 has excellent format support. It successfully played the video content of our Blu-ray rip and gave us full menu support for most DVD ISO rips, as well as happily playing all our codec test files. Alongside a list of file names, the browser show a preview window for video files and album art for music. We were annoyed to find that music tracks usually produced a slight skip when we started playing. After that, entire directories played in correct album order without further problems. Directories full of videos also played sequentially until stopped. Photo viewing worked reasonably well; the slideshow viewer had trouble loading a 38MB TIFF image but smaller TIFFs weren’t a problem.
The EM7080 is cheap for a streamer capable of taking a hard disk and comes with a phenomenal five-year warranty, but it’s also noisy and its functionality is compromised if you don’t add a hard disk. We prefer the Western Digital WD TV Live Hub.
