Eminent hdMEDIA RT EM7080 review

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.