Eminent hdMEDIA Stream DTS Edition EM7075 review

Eminent’s budget streaming media receiver is a glossy little black plastic box that won’t take up too much room next to your TV. It has just one USB port to connect external hard disks, which could be problematic if your disk requires an extra port for power. There’s also the the obligatory HDMI, optical S/PDIF, composite, stereo phono and 10/100 Ethernet ports.

The remote control is small but well designed, with just a few basic buttons to play, skip, navigate and access options. There’s no alphanumeric pad, which isn’t a serious problem as there’s an on-screen keyboard. However, the keyboard is in alphabetical order which makes it a little slow to use letters if you’re used to a QWERTY layout. The remote’s buttons are oversensitive, too, making it easy to click through two menus by holding a key for too long.

The streamer has an unimaginative but nicely designed ribbon interface, with icons that bear more resemblance to the features they’re supposed to indicate than most. When you select each, a further set of options becomes visible below. Network gives you the option of accessing UPnP, Samba and YouTube options. The next ribbon tabs are Video, Music and Photos, which only display content if you have a USB hard disk connected.

The YouTube interface takes a little getting used to – in order to play a video properly, you have to first select it, then press the options button and choose fullscreen from the menu. Even more irritating is the client’s inability to play older YouTube videos – it only supports recent videos which are H.264 encoded, so you’ll find that some content gives you a codec error and refuses to play. The EM7075 also has an integrated NAS server as well as BitTorrent and NZB Usenet download capabilities, but these can only be used if you connect a USB hard disk.

Format support is broad and we had no trouble playing any of our test files, including Blu-ray and DVD ISO rips – Blu-ray playback was video only, though. Playing videos is what this streamer is best at, with handy features like video playlists, well implemented chapter skipping, fast forwarding and video resumption. A simple options menu makes it easy to switch between different audio and subtitle tracks.

Playing audio works fairly well – we experienced no sound glitches when we skipped tracks, album art is displayed correctly and playlists are supported. Tracks can be sorted by file name or title and track ordering is correct.

The photo viewer and slideshow options are a little basic – you can only choose between two styles of transition, but you can rotate, zoom and pan around photos and skip between them. Thumbnails only displayed if entire player is set to thumbnail mode, but this makes it harder to navigate folders as their names only appear as a small line of text at the bottom of the screen when you highlight them.

The EM7075 is a good little media streamer, but it’s let down by poor YouTube codec support and a higher-than-average price. We prefer Western Digital’s significantly cheaper WD TV Live.