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When you've hooked the MovieHome V8 up to your TV and network, you're ready to roll. You can either power it on using the touch sensitive power button on the front of the unit or the included remote control.
After about 15 seconds we are greeted by the main page which consists of seven different icons: Favourites, nTV, File Manager, Settings, Movies, Music and Photos. You can navigate between them using the buttons on the remote control. The interface feels a little clunky and it takes quite a while to navigate through using the remote control.
The first time we used the unit we had to use the settings menu to enable auto-scanning of the hard drive to get it to pick up all our multimedia files. Once this was complete the MovieHome V8 quickly identified all the videos, music and photos on the hard drive and allocated them to the appropriate categories. There is no search function, though, so you have to navigate through the entire lists of files before selecting the required file.
One of the key features of the MovieHome V8 is the ‘nTV' application. This provides access to a number of live news feeds as well as internet TV and radio. This is by far the most disappointing aspect of the MovieHome V8 as the news feeds are text only and we found that the vast majority of the extremely poor selection of internet radio and TV stations didn't work, displaying an error message. The likes of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are nowhere to be seen and there are no on-demand services available either.
When you get back to watching media on the MovieHome V8, the experience is much better. We didn't encounter any problems when streaming 1080p video over our network and video playback was smooth throughout. We tried a number of different video formats including MKV, VOB and XVID and didn't encounter any issues at all, both when streaming over the network and when playing off the internal hard drive.
