At $2,000, the YoloBox Extreme offers incredible versatility with 8 HDMI inputs, 4K 60fps streaming, multi-platform outputs, and built-in media playback, but it also raises questions about who truly needs it. Its touchscreen interface is responsive and flexible, but lacks the speed and tactile control of hardware buttons, making it better suited for slower-paced productions like podcasts, live events, and mobile field setups. While the lack of SDI and professional broadcast features may limit adoption in permanent installs, creators who need portability, multi-source flexibility, and integrated graphics without a full studio setup will find the YoloBox Extreme a powerful all-in-one live streaming solution. Check it out:
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This is not a tablet. It’s actually an 8 input 4K video switcher, recorder, and encoder. It’s the YoloBox Extreme from Yolo Live. And they sent it over to me to try out and make a video about to kind of show you guys how cool it is and all the things it can do. Don’t worry though, they’re not getting any input into this video. All the opinions are my own. And I’m going to talk about the things I like, the things I don’t like, and things that I hope they improve for the future versions. So anyway, let’s actually take a look at it. First of all, even though it looks like a tablet, I mean, it kind of is, you control the whole thing via this giant touchcreen. Let’s take a look at the rest of the hardware, though, before we actually dig into the rest of what’s going on here. So, up on the top here, we actually have eight HDMI inputs. So, the first three of them are just 1080p, but then the last five are 4K inputs. So, that’s awesome. It means you can feed in a ton of 4K sources into this bad boy. Right after that, we have two HDMI outputs. So these can be, you know, multiv- view out, a program out, whatever it is you need out to an extra monitor. Though again, this whole thing is your giant display. So for your main multiv- view, you don’t really need that. You can kind of just put it right here. Then you have a network port, so you can actually hardwire this thing into your network. Two USB ports, two mic line jacks, a type-C port, and a type-C charging port. On the sides, they have these little proprietary antenna connections for their little antennas because this thing also has Wi-Fi as well as 4G cellular. So, you can connect it to whatever you need to if you’re out in the field. On the bottom, you have an audio out, headphone jack. Love to see it. An SD card slot as well as a SIM card slot for that 4G connectivity we were talking about. There’s a quarter20 mount and a power button. And that’s it for IO on this guy. Oh, just kidding. And there is a big speaker on the back as well if you count that for I/IO, you know, whatever. So anyway, this thing is pretty hefty. It’s definitely not something you really want to sit here and hold for a long time, which is why it’s nice that they have that quarter20 mount on the bottom. I will say though, if you’re putting it on any kind of tripod or anything, you better hope that it’s a pretty steady one, especially once you start plugging things in because it’ll get kind of heavy and topheavy. Let’s go ahead and power this guy on. I’m going to do my best to actually record what’s going on on the screen with this camera. So you guys bear with me because unfortunately everything happens directly on this screen. So it’s a little bit hard to show in video when I’m actually interacting with it. So when it boots up, you have two options. We can go into live streaming or we can go into monitor mode. Now both of these actually have similar functionality except that if you actually want to stream, you do this one. If you want to just switch and do a local recording, you’ll do monitor mode. Before we jump into any of those things, though, let’s actually take a look at the settings that we can find over here. First of all, you have the option to log in with a Yellowcast account. I have one, so I logged in, but you don’t have to have one in order to use this. Next up, you can actually add different streaming platforms. So, whether you want to stream to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, or just custom RTMP or SRT or HLS locations. You can set up connections. So, this is where you can connect to Wi-Fi, as I’ve already done. Set up your Ethernet or cellular or USB dongle, hotspot, you know, you name it. This thing has a lot of different connections that it can have, which makes it great to use out in the field. You’re going to have a lot of options to actually get connected to the internet. Got some settings here for showing the CPU usage, settings about the versions you’re running, language, date and time, the keyboard you’re using, uh, display, brightness, storage management, FAQs, conus, you know, normal stuff here. So, now that we’ve looked at that, let’s go ahead and enter monitor mode here. So, right now, we are looking at a little bit of a multiv- view. There’s not a lot to see because we don’t actually have any sources connected. So, let’s go ahead and connect some sources, shall we? All right. So, here we are. We got some things plugged into the top here. I don’t know if you could tell, but it uh looks a little silly with all these things coming out the top. And at this point, I only have two HDMI cables and two hard drives coming out. You can only imagine if I was actually trying to use all eight inputs, as well as another hard drive, a power, an Ethernet, an audio cable. like this thing can get a little ridiculous looking as you start adding things to it and get a little unwieldy. So, you kind of need some sort of base like this to mount the quarter 22 if you’re going to use it in any kind of realistic scenario. I kind of wish that they had a way to just kind of lay it flat on the table. I mean, the only way you can is if it’s sitting flush, but then it’s hard to kind of see what’s actually going on with it. So, I wish there was yeah, some sort of a stand. I mean, obviously you could prop it up on something, anything really, but it’d be nice if there was something built in, some sort of kickstand, especially since this thing is a little hefty. But anyway, this works. We’ll use it like this for now and kind of show off the rest of the software here. All right, so first off, you can see we have two different video inputs showing up here. We have uh this camera that I’m looking at here showing up as HDMI 5, and then we have HDMI 4, which is actually a camera right right here, right here. Um, and it’s just showing what’s on this screen. Now, I don’t know if you guys can see that in the recording, but uh, even though the preview monitor is pretty nice and uh, smooth, those multiv- views are really delayed there, the little preview inputs. So, just something to know. They’re a little laggy, a little delayed. So, definitely don’t use those as something you’re really paying attention to. But, as we look at this page here, we are in what they call director view. So, we have our preview up here. We have our program over here. We have all of our inputs on the side here. And then over in this corner, we have different settings, and we’ll kind of dig in those in a minute. So, at this point, it kind of just works like a normal video switcher like you’d expect. Um, if I hit preview to program, great. That’s just a little cut there. You also have fade to black. You can change the transition type, whatever. But I can cycle between my inputs. One thing that’s really cool about this is the type of inputs it supports. So, obviously, I have two cameras plugged in right here, but I also have two hard drives plugged in. So, let’s add some sources. It grays out all the HDMI and the USB ports because those are just going to get pulled in automatically if they’re video sources, whether they’re cameras or if you plug like a webcam into one of the USB ports. But let’s say I want to add a video. Well, there’s an SD card on the slot and it checks there first, or you have internal storage, which you can load things to, but you also have USB storage. So now it’s grabbing things directly from the flash drives that I have plugged in here. So I can grab any video I want from here. So, say this drone shot and uh this B-roll here. And then I can hit done. And now they’re dropped right in there. And I can use that just like I could any other source. And that’s awesome. Let’s cut up those over there and pause that. But we also have other types of sources, not just video. You can also do images. So, same thing. Grab that. Go to the USB storage and let’s grab a picture here if we wanted that as a source. Finally, you can also grab. I mean, look at all these things. You’ve got PDF, live stream, NDI sources, SRT, SRT listener, RTMP, RTSP, web. So, you can be pulling in all sorts of things. Look at this. We could put in a website as a source directly on here. Now, Google.com probably is not an amazing source because it’s not exactly super dynamic. There we go. I can have google.com as a source. Obviously, you can’t interact with it. So, not a good source. But if you had a site where you had some sort of a dashboard or some other video feed showing up on it, that’s something that you could do. You can also use multiv- views as your sources. So let’s say I wanted a side by side here. Then I can select two different inputs that I want side by side. Put a little background in there. Or I could add an image to use as a background. So let’s get crazy with this, right? We’ll grab this image. Done. Use that. Add some border thickness. change the color and give it a little spacing. There we go. So now I have this awesome side by side that looks super cool. Everybody likes to see this one, right? And let’s cut it over. So you can see it’s super powerful and super quick to add and remove sources like that. You can then zoom in so you can see them a little bit better or zoom out so you get a little bit more space. If you want to remove a source, you just hold down on it and hit the trash. You can also rearrange sources if you want them to be in different places. So, you can see I think this would be a little bit slower in a fast-paced environment to cut because you’re kind of jumping around with your finger like that. But the flexibility you get from it is kind of amazing. You know, the ability to add and remove sources that quickly and set things up so fast and make these multiv- views really quickly. I mean, this device is really responsive and that’s pretty sweet. All right, let’s go ahead and look at the settings we have over here in the bottom right. So, first off, we have overlays. So, let’s just uh cut over to a normal shot here. Um, if I want to add an overlay, it’s as easy as just hitting that and then it pulls it up and I can hit it to turn it off. We can also create new overlays through this menu. They have a lot of um templates here and different types, you know, but they’re really easy to customize as well. So, like if I want to just change that text, great. If I want to change the size or the color, you know, like I said, this thing is super fast and responsive, which I actually think is really cool. You can set a duration so that it autohides after you’re done. But anyway, we can throw that on and boom, there you go. We’ll take it off. So, overlays are really easy to make here. And yeah, they just live here and they’re super quick to use. Next up, you have your audio panel. And so, you can see audio coming in on my different sources here as I scroll through them. Um, you can set them on or audio follow video or adjust some settings just like you could on any other switcher. Here you have your recording settings. Um, you can choose where you want to record to if you’ve got media plugged in and also the quality settings here. You can go in and dial those in to exactly what you need them to be. You also have your streaming settings here. Same thing, setting those settings exactly how you need them to be for your stream. Uh, you have a scoreboard feature. So, if we turn that on, great. we can take that and we can add some points. And in a similar manner, you can customize your scoreboard. So, if you’re using this in a sports scenario, this is something that’s really easy to do as well. Let’s go ahead and turn that off. You have a replay function um to be able to actually replay the last few seconds of something that’s happened. So, that’s really cool to see something like that built in. You can add background music, so if that’s something that you need to do. And here we have transition settings that I actually played with earlier. And then finally, you can choose what does or doesn’t show up on this menu bar and also rearrange them as you need to. So there’s a lot of flexibility there. Finally, we have this little gear icon right here. And this gives you a few different settings. So we can choose whether or not we want to see that CPU usage up in the corner. If we want to see kind of some zones there to make sure we’re not going over things we shouldn’t. We can change the way that we switch. So we can actually just set up a double click to switch. Um oh, we have to turn that in on in director mode specifically. Okay, there you go. And I can just do that. So, that’s a little bit faster way to actually switch our videos. You have local video settings, your input settings, how they respond, what the frame rate is, etc. And then what you want to come out on your outputs and whatnot. So, again, all of this stuff is really just right here. Your recording file management and other configuration. And then finally, we can change out of director mode to just into classic mode if we want, which is just a little bit different where um instead of having that preview program, you just have this one view on the side here. And then your settings over here on the right. Personally, I prefer director mode. I think you see a little bit more information and that preview program is nice to have. But you can see there’s a lot of settings here, a lot of customizability, and it’s all kind of right there. You know, one of the benefits of your switcher having a touchcreen like this is you don’t need companion software in order to control it like you would on like an ATM or something, you know, to get into those nitty-gritty settings. Instead, it’s right here on your switcher. I think they can be good and bad because if you need to change things live during a show with one person while another person is directing and switching, that’s going to be hard to do because it’s all on the same device. But if you’re setting things up ahead of time or on the fly and it’s a pretty slow event, you’re able to do that really easily right here without having to have a separate companion computer in order to do that. Finally, I didn’t show this before, but the button right up here that says wreck, you can use this to actually start a recording of whatever it is you’re doing. So that is the monitor view. So let’s go ahead and go back to get out of this and let’s go into the live streaming view instead. So this is going to be very similar except you’re actually going to live stream what’s on the output instead of just being able to record or monitor it. Now you can live stream to all sorts of different platforms with this thing. But I think the big thing that Yolo Live really wants you to do is use their Yolocast software and platform. you can stream to their platform directly. And it has some sort of extra settings to make sure that it’s buffered really well and that you hopefully don’t experience any lag with any of that. But if we go in here to our live stream, let’s go ahead and create one. Um, you know, we’ll call it test. We’re not going to give it a description or anything like that, but you can go ahead and open that. And you can see once we’re here, it’s honestly a very similar view to what we were already in before. Um, but we can change all of our streaming settings and whatever. Um, and then just start our stream. We can connect this to multiple different streaming platforms all at once. So, you know, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, whatever, and do a multistreaming directly from this device. Then, when we’re ready to go, we just hit go live right here at the top. Now, one of the selling points of this device is the ability to stream actually in 4K natively, which is really cool. You don’t often see that directly on the Switcher for one, and there’s not a ton of devices out there that do stream in 4K. So, that’s a big selling point of this device for sure. Now, as you’re streaming and you’re pulling in sources and whatnot, you do have to keep an eye on that CPU usage up here because that is going to make a difference in how well it’s performing because you have one device that’s doing everything. Every single thing that you add to it, every overlay, every video, every input, whatever it is you’re doing is going to add to that CPU load. So, you do need to be careful that you’re not overloading this device. The keen eyed among you might also have noticed that this is basically just running a custom version of Android. So, you do get some interesting things here. If you swipe down, you can see some network settings. You can see more stats right here for whatever it is you’re doing. You can change the brightness of the device as you need to change the volume on your headset, whatever, whatever. So, that’s kind of interesting. One more feature that this has that I think is actually really cool built in is the ability to bring in guests into your uh live stream. So, you can go here to invite guests and send them an email. And then essentially it gives them a web portal that they can log into and set up their webcam and mic and they can actually come and be a video source into your stream. And on their side they see the program feed. So if you wanted to have a conversation with remote guests, you can actually do that directly from this box, which again is not something that we do in our church, but if that’s part of your workflow, it’s really cool that you can do it directly through here. I did notice it was a little bit choppy on the video when I tested that, but really not bad at all. Finally, it does also have an auto switching feature. I haven’t specifically tried this out because again, it’s not something that I need to use for my church, but if you were to use this in a podcast setting and you wanted to set up a couple different cameras and have it automatically switch based on where the audio was coming from, it can do that. So, if you’re looking to use this in a podcast studio, that might be something that’s really helpful for you. Anyway, you may have noticed that I don’t actually have power plugged into this, and that’s because it does have a battery. I really wouldn’t rely on it for anything super missionritical, but it’s cool to know that you can unplug it and take it on the go if you need to, especially if it’s for something fairly quick, you know, or it’s just moving from one place to the other while you’re still streaming, you know. It’s more of a nice to have than a I’m going to rely on this having a battery and run my entire production off of it. So, that is the Yellowbox Extreme. It’s a very unique switcher, as you guys can see, but honestly, it does a lot of things really, really well. Right now, you can pick it up for $2,000. And that price point is really interesting to me because when I’m thinking about other switchers that are like not pro switchers, um $2,000 feels like a lot. But also, this has 4K inputs, can do 4K recording and streaming. It can do multistreaming. It can combine different networking solutions to stream kind of from anywhere. You know, it’s a really cool device that feels portable and can set up a really great stream kind of from anywhere. And at $2,000 when you’re thinking about all of the things that it does, I think that price point actually does make sense. But if I’m thinking about churches, you know, which is kind of my frame of reference for these things, most of the time we’re in a more permanent setup. And so a device like this, you know, that has like the weird touchcreen instead of physical buttons that probably shouldn’t be powered on constantly, um, is a weird form factor. Like I mean, good luck making this look nice on your desk. I don’t know that I can really recommend it to churches unless it’s like, hey, you’re having services out in the the lawn every week or something like that, you know, and you just need something really easy to set up. It’s also not completely professional, you know, all of your connections are HDMI. There’s no SDI to be found anywhere on this thing. So, like, it’s clearly targeted more towards like the consumer proumer market. And at that point, I’m like, do we really need to be streaming in 4K? Could we have brought the price down a little bit if we kept this as an HD device? Which I do think some of their other devices are like that. So maybe that’s a moot point, right? Maybe I’m comparing the wrong item. I’m just wondering if a 4K version of this really needs to exist at all. But like I mean I could see some use cases for it. Again, if you’re someone who needs to stream from kind of random locations and you don’t want to pack a ton of gear, it’s not a super fast-paced environment. So you are able to rely on just a touchcreen to be able to cut cameras. Um, if you like the flexibility to be able to call up videos on the fly and not have to have like a separate media machine to do all of that because I mean that’s the thing is now we’re talking about it’s replacing Proresenter a little bit, right? Because we’re bringing in lower thirds and graphics and videos more on the fly there. So it has a lot of flexibility packaged into this $2,000. Um, so honestly it’s a cool device. It’s not for me, but if it’s for you, like let me know down in the comments and if you’re looking to buy one, use the link in the description cuz I get a small kickback from that. But let me know what it is you’re going to use this for because I think it’s really cool, but I just wish I had something I needed it for. You know, like it’s this really cool tool. It works really well. It’s really snappy. I’m honestly surprised at how well it works. But I mean, there you go. I’ve been really happy with it. And I just like I’m just struggling to know who it’s for. And you know, maybe that’s just on me. Maybe I’m not being imaginative enough. But I feel like this is a product without, you know, it’s solving a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist. But if you have that problem, let me know. Anyway, I’m going to go play with this some more because maybe maybe I’ll think of it. But anyway, until next time. I feel like I’m being overly negative right now and I don’t mean to be cuz again, I really do like this. I really I really want to use it. I’m just struggling to think of what that would be. You know, you ever you guys ever have that? You’re like, man, I really want this. I really wish I needed this because that’s where I’m at. But anyway, buy it or don’t. You know, you do you, I guess. Like, if you need it, you know it. And if you don’t need it, you you know it. I don’t know. But also, really, this thing really is a It is a chunker. I mean, this whole thing wobbles with this thing on it. Like, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s good. Yeah. It’s a uh it’s a solution without a problem, you know? It’s like this is cool, but like who really needs it? I don’t know. That’s that I guess. Oh well.
