The Me Box S: A Decent Android TV Box with 4K Streaming Capabilities
I recently had the opportunity to test the Me Box S, an Android TV box that promises to deliver smooth 4K streaming and gaming experiences. With a fast internet connection, I was eager to see how this device would perform in real-world applications.
One of the first things I noticed when setting up the Me Box S was its speed. The device's buffer time was surprisingly short, taking only a little longer than the Nvidia Shield Android TV to load. This bodes well for streaming 4K content from services like Netflix and YouTube or even Hulu, as long as you have a fast internet connection.
To test this further, I set up my Me Box S to stream the video "God of War: Chains of Olympus" in 4K at 60fps. As expected, the device struggled to maintain a constant frame rate, dropping down to just 19fps. While this may not be ideal for gaming or watching 4K content, it's worth noting that you can enable frame skip to bypass some of the dropped frames and avoid any potential audio issues.
The Me Box S also boasts access to Google Play, which is a great feature for those who want to play Android games on their TV. I was impressed when playing "Asphalt Extreme," as the game ran smoothly with no stutters or frame drops. The device's use of an Xbox 1s controller via Bluetooth was particularly notable in this regard.
Emulation is another area where the Me Box S shines. Using ppsspp 1.7.5, I attempted to emulate PSP games like "God of War: Chains of Olympus" and "Ratchet & Clank." While performance wasn't ideal – with only 19fps on the first game and dips down to 25fps on the second – it's clear that certain titles will run much better on this device. In contrast, "LittleBigPlanet" was a breeze to emulate, demonstrating that not all PSP games are created equal when it comes to performance.
Retro gaming enthusiasts may also be interested in the Me Box S's capabilities with emulators like Moopan 64 fc+, which can handle N64 titles like "GoldenEye." While the game didn't look great at low resolutions, the device was able to maintain a smooth frame rate even if it dropped down occasionally.
Finally, I tested the Me Box S with PS1 emulation using EPS X II. Downloading this app from Google Play, I was able to play popular titles like "Crash Bandicoot" and "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2." These experiences showcased the device's ability to handle a range of gaming systems, including the PlayStation Classic.
In conclusion, the Me Box S is a solid Android TV box that delivers on its promises. While it may not be perfect for every use case – particularly when it comes to demanding games or emulation – it provides a reliable and smooth 4K streaming experience. At $40, this device is an affordable option for those looking to upgrade their TV gaming setup without breaking the bank.
If you don't already own an Android TV box like the Nvidia Shield, which offers maximum performance but at a higher cost, the Me Box S is definitely worth considering. Similarly, if you prefer using Fire OS over the traditional Android TV interface, this device may be a good fit for your needs. Ultimately, the Me Box S is just another Android TV box with a real Android TV interface – but one that offers a great balance of features and value.
For those interested in installing retroarch and playing older consoles like SNES, NES, Sega Genesis, or Game Boy, the Me Box S has no issues. This feature may not be as exciting for everyone, but it's a nice touch for those who want to relive old gaming memories.
That's all for this video – thanks for watching!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys it's the CTA Prime back here again today I got my hands on the new me box s Android TV and I want to do a quick review on it now before we get started this is a very budget Android TV box I picked mine up from my local Walmart for $39.99 as of making this video they are on sale on walmart.com for that price but they usually retail for around 60 like I mentioned this is a very budget Android TV box if you're looking for the best of the best go with the Nvidia shield Android TV and if you don't mind sacrificing the Android TV interface I would recommend the Amazon fire stick 4k for around the same price as the me box s I will leave links in the description for everything I just mentioned so inside of the box you get the me box ass a short HDMI cable your power supply it's 2.5 amps at 5 volts and the remote now the remote itself actually isn't bad it does have voice control built in there's not much functionality here it runs on to triple-a batteries that come with the unit and overall for a cheap Android box it's great to see a little voice remote the me box itself is very compact I actually like the sleek design of it we only have one USB port on the back power in and HDMI out there's also a 3.5 millimeter audio jack in case you want to plug this into your audio system other than that there's not much going on with the box itself but the main draw to this is it is running a real version of Android TV which I absolutely love I've been using the shield since it was released and I've just gotten really used to it this is approved by Google so we do have 4k YouTube 4k Netflix we also have HBO Hulu I could not get Amazon video to install which is a big disappointment so you need to think about that before you look into getting one of these the specs are out of this world this is a very simple box here the same CPU and RAM has been used in some of these Chinese boxes for a few years now and actually the me box s has the same specs as the last meat box but software has greatly improved here so don't expect a powerhouse the Amazon fire stick 4k is actually more powerful than this and then if you want to jump up you're just gonna have to go with the Nvidia shield Android T but for basic video playback and some light Android gaming this box is perfect for the CPU we have the am logic s 905 X H at least that's what it says on the CPU itself it's a quad-core at 1.5 gigahertz the GPU we have the Mallee 450 they've always stated it's a 3 plus 2 GPU but in all actuality it's a 3 chord G PU so it's the Mallee 450 mp3 ram we have 2 gigabytes of ddr3 storage 8 gigabytes of built-in storage but we can add USB storage be it USB Drive or a powered USB hard drive full size HDMI 2.0 so we can do 4k 60 Hertz out 1 USB 2.0 port on the back 3.5 millimeter audio jack and for the operating system is running real Android TV 8.1 Oreo and one of the reasons I want to stress that this is real Android TV is because there's a lot of Chinese boxes out there that state it runs Android TV it's just a reskin phone version of Android so we don't get access to all the 4k apps that we should on a television I also did a quick teardown mainly to see how they were cooling this CPU now the am logics are set at a very high thermal threshold so they can reach about 97 degrees Celsius before they start throttling so minimal cooling is needed with these s 905 s but they have added a piece of sheet metal here and it does make contact with at least the sheet metal that goes over the CPU itself so it is cooling off the CPU I went ahead and pried the plate off of the CPU we have our RAM our storage and our s 905 X H so with all that out of the way I'm gonna go ahead and boot this up and see how it performs I'm not gonna be running any benchmarks because the benchmarks are gonna be very low with this s 905 but I will be testing 4k video playback and Netflix and YouTube I'm also gonna test the native Android game and then we'll move on to some emulation all right so here we are I've installed a bunch of stuff as you can see the interface itself is way snappier than I ever thought it would be on this s 905 they did a great job optimizing this for Android TV first thing I wanted to test was some YouTube playback now this is an 8k video but it won't display as 8k I can go to 4k but unfortunately my whole Game Capture set up for 1080p so really what we're seeing here is a 1080p picture even though I do have it set to 4k under quality here and I'm gonna turn on stats for nerds we're gonna see how much frame drop we get but realistically we're watching this at 1080p I'm gonna go ahead and move over to my 4k television I'm just gonna record it with my camera it's not gonna be great quality but it'll give you an idea if it'll do 4k content so the first thing you want to do is go into the settings and make sure your screen resolution is set to 4k says 4k 2k 60 Hertz here so we should be running at 4k 60fps first thing I'm gonna test is Netflix go ahead over here finds 4k content and see how well it plays it with me recording this with my camera it's definitely not doing the picture justice I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit and see how long it takes to buffer out to the next section I got a pretty fast internet connection here and I can tell you that it did take a little longer than the Nvidia shield Android TV would but overall streaming 4k content should work pretty well on this device as long as you have a fast enough internet connection moving back over to YouTube this video is set at 4k 60fps I have stats for nerds on and right out of the box we already dropped two frames it's less than I thought and you won't notice this with your naked eye it still looks beautiful and it's very smooth playback like I said with these couple drop frames here and there you'll never notice it unless you have stats for nerds turned on so overall if you want to stream 4k content from Netflix and YouTube or even Hulu the me box s will handle it another great thing about this box is we have full access to Google Play well at least the Android TV version of Google Play and there's lots of games that are gonna perform well on this device one of them being asphalt extreme now I was really impressed when I started playing this game I don't notice any stutters I mean it's a steady frame right here it's fully playable and I'm actually using an Xbox 1s controller because we do have Bluetooth built into this box now it's time to move over to some emulation first up we're gonna test PSP using ppsspp 1.7.5 and we're gonna go with pretty much the benchmark of PSP god of war chains of olympus everything is set as low as possible I have some speed hacks on here and performance isn't great I really didn't expect it to run this game well we're only at 19 FPS when we should be running at 60 you could always start in frame skip on but then you got some sound issues and it just doesn't look right the next game I tested was Ratchet and Clank now this is a relatively easier game to run in God of War I still have had issues on lower-end devices we should be running at a constant 30fps everything is set at low but we do get some dips down into the 25 FPS zone so it's not at full speed and this doesn't mean that every PSP games gonna run horrible there are some games that are gonna run great on here like LittleBigPlanet that's just a really easy game to emulate using ppsspp and there's a few others out there also what about n64 emulation I'm using moopan 64 fc+ from the Google Play Store this is Goldeneye and it's not looking great here either I do have the resolution pretty low it's one above the lowest resolution but when you set it to that 120 by 120 it looks absolutely horrible it's unplayable even if the game is running at full speed Goldeneye is just a problematic game so let's test an easy one we'll go with Mario Kart and we're running at full speed I have had some dips down to 28 FPS but it's not really noticeable it only happens really quick so yeah there are some in 64 games that are gonna run fine on the me box s and for the final test I'll test out some PlayStation 1 emulation using EPS X II you can download this from the Google Play Store I'm gonna jump right into some gameplay round FPS is listed in the top left hand corner and it does playstation one really well I mainly wanted to test this because of the recent release of the PlayStation Classic and how that went over with PAL games running on anything it's not a great system round but as you can see here we're running this in NTSC mode because we're at 60fps and it looks great got one more PlayStation game to test here this is crash bandicoot looks great and it's playing fine so overall I think it's a decent deal for $40 if you don't already own an android TV box like I mentioned at the beginning if you want maximum performance go with the Nvidia shield Android TV if you don't mind using fire OS instead of a real Android TV interface go with the Amazon fire stick 4k so that's pretty much it for this video guys I mean it does what it's advertised to do it'll stream 4k video you can play certain Android TV games PlayStation one works great on here and if you want to install retroarch and play SNES NES Sega Genesis 32x Game Boy Game Boy Advance it'll also work on here just as well it's pretty much just another Android TV box with a real Android TV interface I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel because I got a lot of great content on the way and like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on guys it's the CTA Prime back here again today I got my hands on the new me box s Android TV and I want to do a quick review on it now before we get started this is a very budget Android TV box I picked mine up from my local Walmart for $39.99 as of making this video they are on sale on walmart.com for that price but they usually retail for around 60 like I mentioned this is a very budget Android TV box if you're looking for the best of the best go with the Nvidia shield Android TV and if you don't mind sacrificing the Android TV interface I would recommend the Amazon fire stick 4k for around the same price as the me box s I will leave links in the description for everything I just mentioned so inside of the box you get the me box ass a short HDMI cable your power supply it's 2.5 amps at 5 volts and the remote now the remote itself actually isn't bad it does have voice control built in there's not much functionality here it runs on to triple-a batteries that come with the unit and overall for a cheap Android box it's great to see a little voice remote the me box itself is very compact I actually like the sleek design of it we only have one USB port on the back power in and HDMI out there's also a 3.5 millimeter audio jack in case you want to plug this into your audio system other than that there's not much going on with the box itself but the main draw to this is it is running a real version of Android TV which I absolutely love I've been using the shield since it was released and I've just gotten really used to it this is approved by Google so we do have 4k YouTube 4k Netflix we also have HBO Hulu I could not get Amazon video to install which is a big disappointment so you need to think about that before you look into getting one of these the specs are out of this world this is a very simple box here the same CPU and RAM has been used in some of these Chinese boxes for a few years now and actually the me box s has the same specs as the last meat box but software has greatly improved here so don't expect a powerhouse the Amazon fire stick 4k is actually more powerful than this and then if you want to jump up you're just gonna have to go with the Nvidia shield Android T but for basic video playback and some light Android gaming this box is perfect for the CPU we have the am logic s 905 X H at least that's what it says on the CPU itself it's a quad-core at 1.5 gigahertz the GPU we have the Mallee 450 they've always stated it's a 3 plus 2 GPU but in all actuality it's a 3 chord G PU so it's the Mallee 450 mp3 ram we have 2 gigabytes of ddr3 storage 8 gigabytes of built-in storage but we can add USB storage be it USB Drive or a powered USB hard drive full size HDMI 2.0 so we can do 4k 60 Hertz out 1 USB 2.0 port on the back 3.5 millimeter audio jack and for the operating system is running real Android TV 8.1 Oreo and one of the reasons I want to stress that this is real Android TV is because there's a lot of Chinese boxes out there that state it runs Android TV it's just a reskin phone version of Android so we don't get access to all the 4k apps that we should on a television I also did a quick teardown mainly to see how they were cooling this CPU now the am logics are set at a very high thermal threshold so they can reach about 97 degrees Celsius before they start throttling so minimal cooling is needed with these s 905 s but they have added a piece of sheet metal here and it does make contact with at least the sheet metal that goes over the CPU itself so it is cooling off the CPU I went ahead and pried the plate off of the CPU we have our RAM our storage and our s 905 X H so with all that out of the way I'm gonna go ahead and boot this up and see how it performs I'm not gonna be running any benchmarks because the benchmarks are gonna be very low with this s 905 but I will be testing 4k video playback and Netflix and YouTube I'm also gonna test the native Android game and then we'll move on to some emulation all right so here we are I've installed a bunch of stuff as you can see the interface itself is way snappier than I ever thought it would be on this s 905 they did a great job optimizing this for Android TV first thing I wanted to test was some YouTube playback now this is an 8k video but it won't display as 8k I can go to 4k but unfortunately my whole Game Capture set up for 1080p so really what we're seeing here is a 1080p picture even though I do have it set to 4k under quality here and I'm gonna turn on stats for nerds we're gonna see how much frame drop we get but realistically we're watching this at 1080p I'm gonna go ahead and move over to my 4k television I'm just gonna record it with my camera it's not gonna be great quality but it'll give you an idea if it'll do 4k content so the first thing you want to do is go into the settings and make sure your screen resolution is set to 4k says 4k 2k 60 Hertz here so we should be running at 4k 60fps first thing I'm gonna test is Netflix go ahead over here finds 4k content and see how well it plays it with me recording this with my camera it's definitely not doing the picture justice I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit and see how long it takes to buffer out to the next section I got a pretty fast internet connection here and I can tell you that it did take a little longer than the Nvidia shield Android TV would but overall streaming 4k content should work pretty well on this device as long as you have a fast enough internet connection moving back over to YouTube this video is set at 4k 60fps I have stats for nerds on and right out of the box we already dropped two frames it's less than I thought and you won't notice this with your naked eye it still looks beautiful and it's very smooth playback like I said with these couple drop frames here and there you'll never notice it unless you have stats for nerds turned on so overall if you want to stream 4k content from Netflix and YouTube or even Hulu the me box s will handle it another great thing about this box is we have full access to Google Play well at least the Android TV version of Google Play and there's lots of games that are gonna perform well on this device one of them being asphalt extreme now I was really impressed when I started playing this game I don't notice any stutters I mean it's a steady frame right here it's fully playable and I'm actually using an Xbox 1s controller because we do have Bluetooth built into this box now it's time to move over to some emulation first up we're gonna test PSP using ppsspp 1.7.5 and we're gonna go with pretty much the benchmark of PSP god of war chains of olympus everything is set as low as possible I have some speed hacks on here and performance isn't great I really didn't expect it to run this game well we're only at 19 FPS when we should be running at 60 you could always start in frame skip on but then you got some sound issues and it just doesn't look right the next game I tested was Ratchet and Clank now this is a relatively easier game to run in God of War I still have had issues on lower-end devices we should be running at a constant 30fps everything is set at low but we do get some dips down into the 25 FPS zone so it's not at full speed and this doesn't mean that every PSP games gonna run horrible there are some games that are gonna run great on here like LittleBigPlanet that's just a really easy game to emulate using ppsspp and there's a few others out there also what about n64 emulation I'm using moopan 64 fc+ from the Google Play Store this is Goldeneye and it's not looking great here either I do have the resolution pretty low it's one above the lowest resolution but when you set it to that 120 by 120 it looks absolutely horrible it's unplayable even if the game is running at full speed Goldeneye is just a problematic game so let's test an easy one we'll go with Mario Kart and we're running at full speed I have had some dips down to 28 FPS but it's not really noticeable it only happens really quick so yeah there are some in 64 games that are gonna run fine on the me box s and for the final test I'll test out some PlayStation 1 emulation using EPS X II you can download this from the Google Play Store I'm gonna jump right into some gameplay round FPS is listed in the top left hand corner and it does playstation one really well I mainly wanted to test this because of the recent release of the PlayStation Classic and how that went over with PAL games running on anything it's not a great system round but as you can see here we're running this in NTSC mode because we're at 60fps and it looks great got one more PlayStation game to test here this is crash bandicoot looks great and it's playing fine so overall I think it's a decent deal for $40 if you don't already own an android TV box like I mentioned at the beginning if you want maximum performance go with the Nvidia shield Android TV if you don't mind using fire OS instead of a real Android TV interface go with the Amazon fire stick 4k so that's pretty much it for this video guys I mean it does what it's advertised to do it'll stream 4k video you can play certain Android TV games PlayStation one works great on here and if you want to install retroarch and play SNES NES Sega Genesis 32x Game Boy Game Boy Advance it'll also work on here just as well it's pretty much just another Android TV box with a real Android TV interface I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel because I got a lot of great content on the way and like always thanks for watching\n"
