Emtec Movie Cube S800

This multimedia hard drive has a very classy look, pairing a black case with a glossy white trim.  While it's easy on the eye, we did notice that it was soon spoiled by dust and greasy fingerprints.

On the front, there's a color LCD screen, meaning you can navigate through the content with the television switched off.  This is of real benefit when you just want to listen to some music without having to use your TV.  This screen works in either landscape or portrait mode, depending on whether you lay the Movie Cube flat or stand it on its side.  While this is useful, there aren't any buttons on the front, so if for some reason the remote control stops working, you'll be stuck.

The menus are very similar to those on the HMB 130.  In general, that means they're very traditional, even if the icons have been given a bit of a sprucing up.  In short, very little has changed, and we're still a long way behind the ease of use offered by the Western Digital WD TV.

When browsing through photos and videos, for example, a small preview of the current file is available to the right: it's not as intuitive an approach as thumbnails of all the content, but it's better than nothing.

Compatibility

That the interface resembles that of the HMB 130 should come as little surprise, as the decoding chip inside is almost exactly the same model, with Emtec opting for the Realtek RTD1262PA, while the HMB model has the DA.

These chips offer a fairly average amount of compatibility, including some HD video formats.  Unfortunately, though, H.264 content isn't supported, and while MKV files should work, we found that they slowed the Movie Cube S800 down a lot.

For the rest, you will be able to read MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (DivX 6, XviD, ASP) files, but not WMVs.  The AVI, DIVX, MP4 and MKV container formats can be read.

For HD video, you'll have to settle for DivX HD and MPEG-4 ASP HD.  Music compatibility is fairly average, with MP3, WMA and OGG all supported.  JPEG, GIF, BMP and TIFF images are supported, along with SRT, SUB, SSA, SMI and IDX subtitle files.


Connectivity

There's a whole bunch of video and audio outputs, including component and composite video, SCART (using the supplied adapter) and HDMI for the former, and optical and coaxial for the latter.  There's also a USB host port, allowing you to connect a flash memory drive or an external hard drive, composite inputs and an SD digital tuner.

You also connect the Movie Cube S800 to your home network via the Ethernet port, meaning you can either stream content from another PC, or copy it across to the device's hard drive without having to connect it directly to the computer which has all of your content.  The user interface makes the most of this function by including links to several streaming radio stations.

There's no wireless connection by default, but you can buy a separate USB dongle to add this feature.  Composite and component cables are supplied, however.