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KitGuru review a lot of networking products. We know that many enthusiasts are purchasing NAS systems and media players to enhance their home networking capabilities. Last week we reviewed the latest AC Ryan Playon! HD 2 Media Player and today we take a look at the latest offering from Eminent, the HD Media Player EM7195.
Eminent are a member of the TKH Group, a company who provide state of the art telecommunication and electrotechnical engineering and Industrial Solutions. The goals of Eminent when creating a media player are straightforward, to keep the experience simple and as easy to use as possible.
The HD Media Player EM7195 features USB 3.0 connectivity and the next generation RealTek chipset with a DVB-T Twin Tuner. It is due for release in the UK next month.
The EM7195 arrives in a brightly coloured box with specifications listed on the front and a clear image of the product top right.
The player itself is wrapped in a protective felt bag with foam inserts on either side. Eminent also offer a wireless dongle, but this is an optional extra.
The bundle is comprehensive: several power cables and an adaptor, HDMI cable, USB 3.0 cable, sata power adaptor for external devices, composite cables, optical out and a remote controller. There is also a well written multilanguage booklet.
The remote controller is extremely well designed, and is long and slim for long term comfort. It is also backlit for ease of use in darker environments.
The Eminent player is larger than the AC Ryan Playon! HD2 we reviewed last week and looks great with the brush style aluminum finish. It also marks less easily.
The front is very spartan with a ‘beam' strip which lights up when the unit is on.
On the left side is a card reader and a USB port for connectivity. There is also a fan positioned to the rear of the chassis. Underneath are rubber feet to ensure the unit wont slide, regardless of the surface it is positioned on.
The other side of the chassis has a drive bay tray which requires no screws to open. Simply tug on the lever and slide in the hard drive. It will accept drives up to 2TB in size.
The rear offers a wealth of connectivity options. On the far left is a USB 3.0 port for connection to a PC for fast data transfer. There is an HDMI 1.3 port, with component and composite video connectors. Next to that are optical and coaxial ports and a 10/100 Lan port with another USB 2.0 port. There is a SATA connector on the far right which accepts the supplied SATA power and data connectors to hook up an external drive. Underneath this is a loop and ANT In connector.
There is no demand to open the chassis, as the hard drive can be connected via the drive bay, but we wanted to see the internal structure of the player. It is slightly different when compared to the AC Ryan Playon! HD2 product.
The Eminent HD Media Player EM7195 features the Realtek RT1183 DD C+ chipset with onboard flash to store the user interface. This unit has the capability of connecting an external hard drive to a rear slot for additional expansion. The front of the chassis has a small daughtercard which controls the IR commands and displays the light.
There is also a small 40mm fan which helps to ensure that internal ambient temperatures are kept within specified parameters.
The hard drive fitting is very smooth and we have included a video below of the mounting mechanism in action.
While the Eniment interface is customised it looks rather spartan when compared to the AC Ryan Playon! HD2 we recently reviewed.
There are however 13 ‘theme' options to select from – above is a blue accented design, and a green tinted futuristic landscape. I didn't really find any of the built in theme options to be a great success so I stuck with the default black screen option.
While the interface is spartan and very plain, it is very intuitive and is accessed by simple buttons along the top of the screen. By moving the arrow keys on the remote, the individual sections can be utilised. Music files, movies, TV connectivity, documents and Internet access are all gained from here, as well as access to the setup panel.
The system menu allows for resolution and audio changes as well as options to update the firmware and to format any hard drives connected. As the EM7195 can have two hard drives connected, there are options to format either of the drives.
Warnings are given before a format takes place, and as this player can record from DVB-T there are Timeshifting options also given during the format setup phase.
Web services is a growing aspect of the latest HD media player functionality and the Eminent player delivers a variety of settings to cater for many users.
Sadly we were unable to test the DVB-T support, as we couldn't get our aerial system to cooperate fully with the player, perhaps due to our location or some other random factor.
Networking support is good as the EM7195 detected our multiple NAS systems, and WORKGROUP network, without a hitch. The menu panels might not be that clearly labelled to some users, but these are accessible from the ‘Samba' submenu system.
On this page we will look at the various playback options available from the Eminent HD EM7195 player.
Playback from the Eminent EM7195 is smooth and we experienced no issues during any of our testing. Videos from online websites and services all played without a hitch. One of the upsides of the rather plain user interface is that each section would open very quickly without stalling.
YouTube videos, as we hoped, all played back without problems and the interface is very quick to navigate.
Above, we are using the player to access one of our networked hard drives to play a BluRay movie stored in a ‘folder' format on a hard drive. You can see that playback is super smooth even when streaming native 1080p content.
Below we have included a video of a 1.4GB MKV HD file which we are transfering to the internal hard drive across a network powered by several Belkin 16 port 1GBit switches. This Eminent player isn't gigabit enabled however it seems no slower than the AC Ryan Playon! HD2 we reviewed last week.
While streaming content was very impressive, copying content was no better than the AC Ryan Playon! HD2 player. It is significantly slower than a gigabit enabled PC on the same network.
USB 3.0 performance is very impressive, averaging 123 MB/s.
The Eminent HD Media Player EM7195 is a good product in its own right, but unfortunately with the customised AC Ryan products it faces stiff competition. We were initially very disappointed by the drab and dreary graphical user interface which pales beside the AC Ryan Playon! HD 2. It does however run faster than the AC Ryan interface, so perhaps many people will be willing to live with the reduced eye candy. While we appreciate the faster speed right now, we know that AC Ryan will get speed improvements ramped out in the coming months.
As a networked product for the home, the EM7195 certainly is impressive. It can handle a plethora of media files, such as OGG files and even unusually encoded MKV containers. There wasn't a single file that the Eminent failed to play, even ISO files, and DVD and Bluray folders stored on networked drives. On this level it won't fail to impress.
This player doesn't have gigabit lan support however it does appear to be slightly better than models from the last generation. It had no issues in streaming 1080p content from NAS systems on the same network, but when copying directly to an internal hard drive, it is still painfully slow.
Our 1.4GB test file took much longer copying across the network, than to a gigabit enabled PC, often 10-15 times slower. This might seem acceptable, but if you are moving 10GB files on a regular basis you are left with hooking the EM7195 up to a PC to use the USB 3.0 connection. If your PC is in a different room, this can be annoying.
The Wireless connection is also very slow and has a trouble streaming 1080p content, often hitching and stuttering when the bitrate climbs during active scenes. We would recommend the use of high quality networked cables for 1080p content.
As with the AC Ryan product we reviewed last week, the product generates very little noise and it consumes around 18 watts of power under full load, which is very efficient.
Pros:
- Interface is fast
- Hard Drive tray mechanism is great and works well
- Runs quiet
- Remote is the best of the bunch, and is backlit
- Easily upgradeable storage
- Wireless connectivity options
Cons:
- Interface looks rough and isn't customised to the same level as the AC Ryan product
- Wireless struggles with 1080p streaming
- wired networking support needs a speed boost
- AMD and Nvidia discrete cards offer better image quality and more fine tuning options.
KitGuru says: A solid High Definition media player, but it faces stiff competition from AC Ryan who customise their products and offer regular firmware updates.
I like the brushed aluminum. I think AC ryan opting for the piano black, looks great, but it would be a nightmare to keep clean.
Otherwise, in my opinion there are far too many of these realtek players on the market. but what do I know 🙂
Thats a pretty ugly looking interface, but it does seem to move pretty quick looking at the videos. perhaps AC ryan went overboard with the graphics?
Its a nicer design physically than the AC ryan model, but I agree, they havent done anything with the interface to improve it. Seems basically like they just bought a bunch of boards and put them into the chassis. nothing much else.