The YoloBox Extreme is a powerful all-in-one live streaming solution that makes fully NDI-based productions practical for churches, creators, and live event producers. Steven Ballast highlights how his team uses the YoloBox Extreme to stream an ASL service with five NDI cameras and a full-bandwidth NDI ProPresenter feed for lyric overlays—delivering reliability on par with top-tier streaming platforms. With advanced features like up to six NDI inputs, ISO recording, HDMI in/out, PTZ camera control, and alpha channel support for transparent overlays, this portable device simplifies complex workflows while maintaining broadcast-quality results. Designed for flexibility, the YoloBox Extreme gives ministries and content creators the tools to expand their productions without the need for extra computers or complicated setups.
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So, now I’ve got five NDI cameras coming in and one full bandwidth NDI from Proresenter. Hello, I’m Steven Ballast. I’ve been a longtime fan of the Yolo Box line. I started out showing you on this channel the original Yolo Box and we’ve looked at the Pro and the Ultra, and today we’re looking at the Extreme. Now, we use a Yolo Box every week here at our church to live stream. It’s actually a secondary stream for us. We use it for an ASL or sign language alternate stream of our worship service. To do that, we take the video out from our video switcher and run it into the Yolo Box and overlay a camera of our ASL interpreter and we live stream that direct from the YOLO box to an RTMP destination streaming service. And I have to say, for our primary live stream, we use what many would say is the premier top tier live streaming service for churches. I’m sure you’ve probably heard of them. And for the two or more years that we’ve been streaming with the Yolo Box in parallel, the success or failure rate between these two methods of streaming has been the same. I’ll just leave that there. All that to say, I’ve been really happy with the Yolo Box as a live streaming solution. Each new Yolo Box model from Yolo Live, from the original to the Pro, Ultra, and now the Extreme, has incrementally given us more processing power, more inputs, and more features. One of the things to understand about the Yolo Box as a standalone live streaming tool is that they can do a wide variety of things from different overlays, bringing in different sources, 4K recording, ISO recording, sending out the stream to multiple destinations, just a whole list of things that these boxes can do. But what you need to understand to be successful with the YOLO box is that it’s also limited by the processing power of the box. What that means is yes, you can do all of these things, but it doesn’t always necessarily mean you can do all of them at the same time. Sometimes it’s taken people a little bit of experimentation to figure out if the combinations of features you need to use will all work together at the same time. And that’s where the extreme, as the next increment in the Yolo box line, brings us the most processing power we’ve seen in one of these boxes yet. And that enables more inputs. The Extreme has eight HDMI inputs, four of which can be used with 4K sources that can be ISO recorded while you are streaming. It has two HDMI outputs, which is a first in the Yolo Box line. You could use one to send your program out and the second as a multiv- view, or you could select a few different things that can be routed to that output. For instance, you could just send one of your inputs and pass it through to that output, kind of like an ox out on a regular video switcher. The Ethernet port for your internet connection. The Extreme can also connect through Wi-Fi and it comes with external antennas you can use to boost that signal. There are two USBA ports and a USB C port. This last USBC is for charging and an 8 inch mic input. On the bottom, it has a headphone output for monitoring your audio, an SD card slot, your SIM card slot for connecting through a cell tower and using cellular data for your live stream, a/420 mount, and finally the power button. Another feature of the Extreme that I think a lot of people have kind of missed the implications of, and that is the ability to bring in six NDI input sources. So far, most standalone switchers that I’ve seen might have the ability to bring in one NDI input, and it’s kind of added on as an afterthought to the switcher. So, to really switch a fully NDI based video system, you’d have to use a computer, maybe with OBS or V-Mix. And that’s what I want to focus on in this video. I want to look at using this extreme, this standalone portable device to set up an all NDI based video system. One of the things that makes an all-in-one streaming, recording, video switcher device like this appealing is its portability and simplicity. And how quick and easy of a setup would it be to just have to run one Ethernet cable to each of your cameras using a PoE switch? Beyond that, Yolo Live has also added a new NDI capability to the extreme that previous models haven’t had that make this work even better for churches that want to overlay lyrics. So, I’m excited to show you that in a minute. Let’s take a look at setting this up. I’ve gathered every NDI capable camera I could find. I’ve got the Honey Optics PTZ camera, an Obsot Tail 2, and just to throw another camera in the mix, I’m also using the Tail Air that has NDI out over Wi-Fi. These two cameras are connected to a PoE switch through their Ethernet cable. That’s what I’d recommend doing for reliability and latency instead of using the Wi-Fi. That Ethernet cable provides power to the camera as well as sends out the NDI video signal and it’s also going to let us control the camera. And yes, we can do that right from the extreme as well. I’ve already set up these cameras on the network and to output NDI. That process will be unique to the configuration settings of whatever camera you end up using. I’ve also set up the extreme on my wired Ethernet network as well in its configuration. So let’s first create an event and go into that event. And now to add these cameras to the extreme, tap the add video source button here and select NDI. And it will find the NDI cameras on your network. Select one and tap done. And that’s now coming into the stream as one of our inputs that we can select to go live in our video. I’ll just repeat that for my other cameras. But I want to max this out. I want to have five NDI HX camera sources and then our full bandwidth lyrics overlay NDI source to make six NDI sources coming into the extreme. I’ve set up computers here on my network using NDI tools to output their display over NDIHX as well. So those cameras are going to be my last two camera sources. So let me add those. Now I have five NDI HX camera sources coming into the extreme and I can select which one I want live on my video by tapping them. Now, to set up PTZ control for our cameras, tap the little gear icon in the top right corner of your input and select PTZ control. Now, here you’ll need to know the IP addresses of your camera on your network. You should know that already from when you set up your cameras on your network. And now I can control my camera right here on the Xreme. Before we add in our lower thirds from Proresenter, and that’s one of my favorite new features of the extreme, is that it can now use the alpha channel of an NDI feed. But before we get to that, let me say a couple things about bandwidth and data rates and all of that. NDI video is running over your network, so it has to follow the rules of the road for networking. What I mean by that is the NDI feeds coming into the extreme for my setup that’s using this wired Ethernet connection. All of that data has to fit through that one pipe. Now the extreme supports up to six NDI HX feeds and up to two full bandwidth NDI connections. And this limitation somewhat is probably related to the network bandwidth, but it’s also probably a limitation of the CPU of the extreme as well. Each of those NDI sources has to be decoded by the CPU. I found this setup to be most stable and to get the least amount of latency on my camera feeds when I set each camera to the lowest bandwidth setting that I could tolerate for quality. For my tail two, six megabits per second for the 1080p 30 video was buttery smooth and had decently low latency. Over a network, you’re always going to have some amount of latency to deal with. You know, this is never a setup you’d want to use for iMac. But by keeping the bit rates lower, we can reduce the processing time for both the camera and the extreme and keep the latency as low as possible. When I turned the bit rate up to 8 megabits per second, I started to notice some stuttering or drop frames, but I’m actually pretty sure it was on the tail 2 side because I’m able to get the Honey Optics camera up to 12 megabits per second and it’s still really smooth. All of this to say, depending on what cameras you have, you’ll probably have to do some experimenting with what bit rates get the best results. You’ll probably not be able to just turn it on and have everything work well. Okay, now let’s finally bring in our lyrics from Proresenter to be overlaid over our video. In Proresenter, go to screens, configure screens, and now we are going to add a new audience screen. Select new NDI. I’ll select 1080p 30. And let’s rename this to something more informative. I’ll call it video overlay. And down here in the NDI settings, let’s name this Prop P NDI. Now, here’s the important part. On the alpha key tab, we’re going to select premultiplied. Then under screens, edit looks, we’re going to choose a theme for our video overlay output that has our lyrics formatted to be at the bottom. And the theme doesn’t have any background, so it’s transparent. This is the really cool part. Because the extreme now recognizes the alpha channel that’s embedded in the NDI video, we won’t have to use a chroma or green screen key anymore. The transparency from Proresenter will be used in the extreme. So, back on the extreme, add a new video source and select NDI. And we should find our proresenter source. And now we have our lyrics coming in as a full screen input. If we tap that, it could be used just like any other input. But now let’s go to the overlay settings page and tap add overlay. And then on the video source tab, select our prop input. Scale it all the way up and tap done. Now we can turn this overlay on by selecting it in the overlays page and it gets overlaid over our video. And as we change cameras, it stays overlaid and it’s going to be updating as our lyrics operator advances our lyrics. So now I’ve got five NDI cameras coming in and one full bandwidth NDI from Proresenter. I just find this setup really cool because I don’t know of any other standalone portable device that can switch that many NDI sources, which really makes a fully NDI video production practical. Next, if you’re new to the Yolo Box and haven’t seen any of the previous models, let me give you a quick overview of how the Yolo box works and also a couple specific workflow things that I would do if I were setting this up for a live production. The way the Yolo Box interface is laid out, obviously this large display here is what’s live on your video with your camera input thumbnails below that. And tapping on these takes them live in your video. You can change the size of the thumbnails by tapping this little icon here. The right side of the screen are all your settings and where you operate some additional features. You select which menu you are in with these icons at the bottom. And you can change the order of these tabs by scrolling to the end here and tapping these three dots. Now you can just drag these to rearrange them. So if your icons are in a different order than mine, that’s why. This first menu is our destinations for live streaming. Just tap to add a destination and select where you want to go. And you’ll be asked to log in to your account. It also shows your encoder settings here at the top. You can tap it to modify it, but realize when you do that, you’re actually just being taken to a different tab on the bottom here. So, you could access it that way as well. Here you can set the encoder setting for your live stream, which also will be used for an NDI output or SRT output if you have that turned on. And this second set of encoder settings are for your recording. I love that we can record a different bit rate than what we are streaming because we’re always going to want a higher quality recording for later editing compared to what we send out for our stream. Then we have the overlays tab. We’ve already seen the video overlay that we added from Proresenter, but you can also add lower thirds with names or different titles, timers. The YoloCast overlays is a free online tool that you can use from Yolo Live where if you set up a free a Yolo Live account, you can make overlays in their browserbased tool and add them to your video here. Next is the recording tab. Here you can select where you want to record to. There is internal storage on the Xreme itself. You can insert an SD card for recording and you can also connect an external USB hard drive and record to that. Again, it shows you the recording encoder settings that came from the other page. And here we can select what to record. Obviously, the program output is the default, but you can also record an ISO recording of each of your inputs and then record limits. This will chunk your recordings into multiple files. So, in this case, every 10 minutes, the recording will start a new file. This is just a safety mechanism. So, if for some reason something happens and the current recording has a problem, you won’t lose hours worth of recording. You can bring in guests if you’re doing a podcast, maybe. I’ll be honest, I’ve never had a need to use this feature. The audio mixer. This lets us turn on and off audio from our input sources. You can select if the sourc’s audio is just always on or uses AFV or audio follows video. That means that the audio from a camera will switch on when that camera is live but then turns off when you go to a different camera. And finally, there’s a headphone and master volume slider for your program. And if you connect an external USB audio device, which is what I would recommend as the best way to get audio in from, say, an audio mixer, that will show up here in the audio page as well. The music tab, a new feature here on the Extreme is you can load in audio files from the SD card or a USB device that can be played from this interface. This is great for pre-show music. Auto switching. This lets you automatically switch between your inputs at a determined interval. Comments lets you see any comments that are coming in on your live stream from your social accounts. Then instant replay and the scoreboard. These are obviously useful if you are live streaming sports. Network bonding is a paid feature from Yolo Live that lets you use the shared bandwidth from multiple network connections. So, your Ethernet, your Wi-Fi, you could connect a USB dongle access point or the internal SIM card through a cell tower. And this will give you more reliable bandwidth for your stream. Especially if you’re streaming out somewhere where you don’t have one solid connection, you can divide your bandwidth up amongst multiple connections. And then transitions. The default is to cut between your inputs, but you could also set that to something else and then it will use a different transition when you switch. In the settings, this gear icon in the top right, there are a lot of different things that we can configure. This is where you would change your HDMI output settings. So, if you want HDMI 1 to be something different than program, and in this case, I have HDMI 2 set to be this entire interface that you’re seeing. Another nice new feature of the Extreme. This is a simple thing, but I really appreciate it. If you swipe down from the top, it gives you a little readout of some useful information. How much CPU you’re using, battery life remaining. You can control your headphone output volume, adjust the screen brightness, and then also down here you can see some information about your stream when you’re streaming. This is really useful because one of my I’ll say hesitations about using standalone encoders for live streaming versus a computer is that when you have an issue with your live stream, and I’ve been streaming long enough to know that it’s not if you have a problem with your live stream, but when you have a problem with your live stream, usually it’s a lot harder to troubleshoot what’s going on with a standalone encoder. So, having this information can quickly tell us the health of our stream. Once I have things set up and recording and streaming, I kind of prefer to operate the actual show in this view here where my inputs are on the side and I get a bigger view of what camera is live. It kind of depends on how many camera inputs you have, I guess, but you can still access the menus in a pop out from the side when you tap on them. You can also just tap and drag an input to change where it’s located. And if you tap the little settings icon in the top right, you can also rename your camera. I’ve been really impressed with all that’s packed into the Xreme. It’s also got a big screen that’s nice and bright and easy to see all your cameras on. Yet, this thing is still very portable. It could easily fit in, say, the pocket of a laptop bag. I’ve really enjoyed checking out The Extreme and I think you will too. Until next time. Bye.
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