The Emtec MovieCube P800 comes in two parts: a multimedia case on which you attach an external hard drive that is also supplied. Beyond that, what we have here is a recording device with a digital tuner. What formats can it handle when it comes to HD video, music and images? What formats aren’t supported? Read on to find out!

Looking a bit like a broadband box, the P800 is a multimedia hard drive with an interesting design: it offers a multimedia base on which an external hard drive is placed. This is practical as you don’t need to unplug the whole box to fill up with multimedia files. Only Emtec P100 external drives are compatible with the base but you can link up other hard drives via one of the two USB Host connections.

Apart from that, the plastic used for the casing is of average quality and there is no controls screen. This means you have to turn on the TV to listen to music. The menus aren’t particularly original but they’re easy to work your way around even if they do lack a bit of character and ambition. You can’t, for example, view an image file as a thumbnail or sort through the list of films by their jacket poster. The remote sits nicely in your hand and has a nice finish. There is however quite a delay when you press on a button and this makes menu navigation imprecise. Note, energy consumption on standby is high at 4.4W. When playing the reading oscillates between 15W and 20W, which is average.

Decoding: DivX HD and MKV

Although we weren’t able to see exactly what decoding chip is used, we reckon it’s a Realtek RTD1262PA model. This chip gives similar possibilities to other recording boxes with rather average HD video support.

Video codecs MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP (XviD, DivX) are supported in both standard and high definition. Once again however we regret that there is no support for MPEG-4 AVC, which is used for H.264 and x264. For the containers (= file extenstion more or less), support is pretty standard, including AVI, DIVX, MP4 and… MKV. MKV support is rather incidental when you think the vast majority of videos in MKV containers are encoded in MPEG-4 AVC, a format that isn’t supported here.

Music file support is very light with only the two standards, MP3 and WMA, supported. Photo formats supported are JPG, BMP, GIF and TIF. And that leaves what is very comprehensive subtitling support: SRT, SUB, SSA, SMI and IDX, all there!

Connectivity: HDMI, SDHC reader and USB

Connectivity is pretty comprehensive and includes HDMI, YUV, RCA, optical and coaxial. As we noted further up, two USB sockets are available for linking to external hard drives and USB keys. Also and this is something we appreciate, an SDHC card reader is included on the right side of the device. This is great for viewing your recent shots.

A 10/100 Ethernet socket gives network connectivity and allows you to read the multimedia files shared on a computer. You can also copy computer files onto the box from the box interface. It isn’t possible to copy in the other direction however because the box has no NAS function.