Eminent HDMedia DVB-T EM7195 review

Although Eminent’s media streamers aren’t as glossy as Apple’s TV or D-Link’s Boxee Box, we’ve often been impressed by their capabilities. Like previous models, the EM7195 has outstanding format support, playing everything from MKV files with full surround sound audio tracks to DVD and Blu-ray disc images.

The EM7195 has an integrated dual DVB-T tuner which you can use to watch and record digital terrestrial television simultaneously. Recordings are stored on its 1TB hard disk, which you can also use to save BitTorrent and Usenet NZB downloads – you can’t access these clients through your TV, unfortunately, instead having to configure downloads over your network via a web interface. The EM7195 can also share the contents of its hard disk across your network, so you can play recorded TV shows on other devices.

We were pleasantly surprised to see USB3 here, allowing for quick file transfers from other devices

The player has plenty of connectivity options, with component, composite and HDMI outputs, stereo phono analogue audio out and both optical and coaxial S/PDIF for digital audio. Two USB ports can be used to connect external storage drives or even an optical drive – although Blu-ray ISO disc images are supported, we had no luck playing physical discs when we connected a USB external BD-ROM drive. There’s also an SD card reader and a USB3 port that you can use to connect the EM7195 directly to a PC for easy access to content stored on its hard disk or to copy content across.

The current version of Eminent’s user interface bears a close resemblance to the PlayStation 3’s XMB interface. It’s easy to navigate, with dedicated sections for Setup, Documents and Internet as well as different types of media files on both the device and your local network.

You can access the internal hard disk via this door

If you want to view online content, you’ll find it in the Internet Media Service sub-menu of the Internet tab, where you’ll be presented with a range of streaming video services, starting with YouTube. You can’t log into your YouTube account and searching through videos is a clumsy affair involving an on-screen keyboard, but you can connect a USB keyboard to make typing easier. You can also look through the usual generic lists of recently added and top rated videos. Unfortunately, the interface isn’t well designed and we had enormous trouble simply getting anything to play.

Other internet media content was restricted by country, such as Ziggo streams, only available if you have an internet connection from Dutch ISP Ziggo. We were unable to connect to Flickr and unable to play video content from CNN, but at least Google’s Picasa worked well and allowed us to log into our account. There’s also a web browser, but it’s virtually impossible to use without connecting a keyboard and mouse.

Although it’s fine for basic navigation, the remote control proved problematic when it came to trying to use the streamer’s more advanced features, as its generically-labelled buttons don’t always do what they’re supposed to. For example, the Home and Info buttons don’t work on every screen. The Info button is also limited – when you’re watching TV, pressing it shows you what’s on now and next, but it doesn’t pull details out of the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). It’s more useful when you’re watching recordings or video files, providing access to data about the file and making it easy to switch audio and subtitle tracks on and off.

When you’re watching live TV, the programme up and down buttons, instead of fulfilling their obvious functions, fast forward and rewind TV footage instead. Also, an inconsistent bug in the PVR system means you can’t always delete programs you’ve recorded – we were able to remove some, but others weren’t removed when we attempted to delete them via the Playback Recording screen. At least playing files works as expected and we can’t fault the quality of the recorded files.

The remote doesn’t always function as you’d expect

PVR features aside, the EM7195 also works well as a plain media streamer. It’s easy to browse network shares, whether they use SMB, UPnP or NFS. It supports playlists for music, but not films, and even has a lovely optional thumbnail browser for photos, which you can access by pressing the unmarked yellow button. It’s easy to configure the streamer and connect it to your network, too.

Although there’s plenty to like about the EM7195, such as its excellent format support, large internal hard disk and ability to read from external devices, it also suffers from some significant flaws. Most of these relate to its interface. Despite big improvements over previous incarnations, the interface still feels sluggish and inconsistent. If you’re just browsing files on a network share, everything goes smoothly. However, if you do anything more complicated, whether it’s viewing YouTube videos or trying to manage your recorded TV programs, you’ll run into inconsistent remote control button assignments and long loading delays.

If the EM7195 was cheaper, its versatility would help overcome these drawbacks. However, a budget laptop or nettop with an HDMI output doesn’t cost much more, while a high-quality streaming media receiver such as D-Link’s Boxee Box costs much less and works far more smoothly.