YouTube Video Editing on a Cheap Android TV Box - is it Possible? 

I feel like Atomic Shrimp can be summed up with "Cooking scammers in the forest with a fake 2TB flashdrive, a spoon, and £1"

oh man this is the most atomic shrimp thing yet

a good tip (if you don't mind human interaction) is to go around to offices and ask if they have any computers that they're getting rid of, sometimes they get rid of hundreds at a time. Often they'll be more than happy to let you just take one as they are just going to give them to an E-waste place anyway.

1:34 I feel like the stink lines in the pic was a warning

I edit my videos on a 2008 MacBook Pro that I pulled out of the trash. With an SSD and upgraded RAM, it actually runs iMovie pretty well.

“Absolutely not it was pretty painful” hahaha I always appreciate your very frank and honest reviews of your projects 😃

You've got so much range as far as your ability to make content. You've done other tech videos but this video pretty much solidified the fact that you could only do tech reviews videos if you wanted.

The ending totally caught me off guard. I genuinely never expected that you managed to actually edit this video using that product. I commend you greatly for your time and effort.

If you gently peel off the Royal mail sticker on the front you will see the Chinese one underneath it. It did not come from the UK

A nice option would be the Raspberry Pi 400 - the all in one keyboard, mouse, raspberry pi bundle of cuteness. It's affordable and you just need a cheap monitor or TV.

I wonder if it has a shiny plastic printed top? I'd really like to see that! Aww man.....

Wow, editing a video on that is ingenious. Which app did u later use?

I used one of those types of keyboard for a silly amount of time.It was a bit crap but I gained a real affection for the thing

Your videos are completely oftopic for me. I stumbled across one of your food budget challenges. Im working my way through content I never saw myself being interested in.. thank you for opening up my mind today

I'm always so impressed by the variety of content found on this channel.

Ah the silly sort of videos that make getting up before noon on the weekend worth it.

Painful as it may be to do on a device such as this, I still find it amazing that editing can be done in the first place on something so inexpensive. It shows how powerful these devices have become. Perhaps this reflects on my age and the fact that I’ve seen tremendous evolution in the computers I’ve used over the years.

I think, with most smart phones being so good, you could almost edit on a phone without being able to tell. Such an interesting video idea and, as always, an awesome video! I love it!

The best most distigushing aspect of this channel is the range or unique video ideas the creativity is amazing making entertainment out of so many niche things there isn't a lot of channels like this on youtube

You couldn't have uploaded this in a better time, was looking for a video review of that keyboard touchpad thingy ( they're sold separate here ) for my Smart TV. So, cheers Mike. Have a good day 👍

Nice to see more people using Resolve! Made the switch last year and never looked back. Really cool experiment!

I use this as my movies/video watcher, does the job very fine.

Chinese Ebay/Amazon seller companies set up warehouses in the UK and all over Europe years ago. I know because I learned of this back in 2005 when I sold packaging to a Chinese ebay warehuse in Birmingham. I imagine now there are far more of them. My theory about the customs declaration is that this item was shipped to the warehouse by the chinese company first and held in stock and then just shipped to you in the original packaging.

Did anyone else see the thumbnail and think the box was a tiny little screen? The shine and the way the logo design and colors cover the entire top of the device honestly fooled me. lol 😅

That's honestly amazing that you can achieve that with little more than 30 bucks worth of kit. I didn't even notice the video was any different that a normal video edited on Resolve. There's never been such a low barrier of entry to creating your own TV and movies.

Leave it to Mike to make a video I would otherwise have no interest in watching into a video I absolutely loved. Mike, I love your creativity, and your fantastic wholesome realness you put forward in all of your videos. I am sure I am not alone in saying that you seem like the kind of guy that I would love to share a drink with and just talk. Better yet, I would just listen. Thank you for being you and making such great content.

Started with PowerDirector and moved on to Resolve. That was my exact journey as well, so I found that bit quite fascinating.

Atomic Shrimp is the perfect Sunday show 😉 relaxing and creative

Wow, that looked unnecessarily painful to use. But aside from that, your right, if that was literally the only device you had at your disposal, I suppose you could start your RU-vid career with something similar. I'd suggest a usb dock of some sort and adding a full sized keyboard and mouse to make things simpler. Great content! Thank you for giving insight into how content creation may be for RU-vidrs!

Great video still amazing that it can be done on such a cheap device even if it is painful to do .

I use Youcut on my phone and quite frankly on powerful phone hardware it is absolutely usable...but mostly I am using it for splicing only 3 or 4 clips together for Instagram where it would take more time to plug in my computer, load resolve, and import footage than just doing it by touch. Nothing advanced but was still surprised by how much it had came along compared to mobile video editing even 3-4 years ago. I can't imagine using it on ultrabudget hardware though. Neat experiment!

Can you edit video on a toaster? Yes. Would you want to do that? No. Some seriously deep insight here dude.

Love it!! No external storage is a deal breaker for me, wonder why it didn't work. Have not found a precision video cutting tool yet that from android that meets my expectations, vidtrim Pro is the best I've found so far without having to create a whole separate project for the file.

I admire your patience

Interesting video. Thank You ! Personally I think Raspberry Pi 4 is as low as I would want to go. You can not only install Raspbian on the Pi but also Ubuntu et al and the variety of video editing software shoud be better, with possibly more frequent updates.

I'd be interested to see a comparison with an old workstation say the same price

I've used two variants of that keyboard over the last 6 years. The first one died after airport scans when I visited Japan, but otherwise it's a nice secondary media control pad. I mainly use it to play/pause, volume, and quick messaging like this comment. I do wish my version had a backlight however.

Wow you put a lot of work in for this one! Nice

i bought an android tv box thing 6 or 7 years ago to make my old "big "screen 32" hdtv a smart tv and it worked a treat, got it off of aliexpress for $30 and got a half size wireless keyboard for $20 its was perfect for watching youtube vids { but not in 1080, internet was to slow) and movies on sd cards, it was tiny maybe the size of my 2 thumbs put together and it got very hot, so i put a fan next to it

i have 2 of those little keyboards for now and looking at a 3rd, they are honestly so good for things. currently using one for easy access to things in my sim rig and another on my media pc, thinking of getting another for my minecraft server

Interesting! Who would have thought! I think a quality budget mic for voice over would really up the quality of this style of video

Cool. Thanks for doing this.

Nice video, I managed to get a cheap Amazon tablet and use that along with powerdirector , works very well and so much more convenient that having to fight over the family computer

Interesting. Great as always AS

Great video as always.

This was a great video. I'd love to see more similar content

Thanks for the plug re Davinci Resolve. Will give that a bash and see if its better then the one i am currently using for youtube videos.

I love my Android box, video master (mostly RU-vid) and great Emulation box, plus there's so much more you can do with it, almost as much as a Raspberry Pi, teriffic value for £35, the basic remote is all-important

As far as suggestions for video editing on a complete thing, a chromebook is probably a valid contender. The one I've got here, I have had for about a year, I just trialed that program you mentioned also. It seems the chromebook is competent enough to run it and export video reasonably quick. This chromebook also has a screen attached, as it's a laptop basically, which means it also has keyboard and touchpad and an SD slot and a couple USB, it also charges right over usb type C, it has a built-in camera and microphone. The microphone and camera are both passable for simple, low/mid quality stuff. This one also has a combo headphone/mic headset jack, so I reckon the recording quality could easily be improved cheaply. If the TV box cost $40 USD, let's say, and this class of chromebook I have can be found for around $125 new at this point, I think it's possibly a contender. The tv box doesn't have camera, microphone, or a screen. If those components already exist, then yeah, the TV box is probably cheaper, but as I would consider them almost essential as part of a complete editing suite, I think it's a valid contender. A decent monitor, new, is gonna cost around $50 alone, I think, but if that needs speakers then a low-end TV is probably another $10-20. Anyway that's just my thoughts. Good job on the video, seems the TV box did pretty good rendering. Keep up the good work!

Yes

Clunky, uncomfortable, sometimes non responsive and unstable. You're described Adobe Premiere perfectly.

This smol thing seems pretty alright Im gonna have to look more Into one

Oooh. The keyboard looks nice

What a cool video idea

Might have a few ideas on other TV boxes that could handle this better, nice video.

If this interests anyone, like he said some of these android boxes can run Armbian, a distribution of linux. Support is somewhat spotty and software support is not spectacular, but if you find a model that's supported it can be an interesting little thing to play with.

I don't have a Windows PC / Laptop (just a Chromebook) to edit on sadly, otherwise I would probably use that. I use an app called VN from the Google Play store (I could of course put it on the Chromebook but it's more effort to use it on that). It's very easy to use, although it has some little quirks that can get annoying sometimes. But, seeing as my editing is very simple, it's good enough for me. Great video, it was most interesting to see editing in a different style. 👍

This is a very neat video

I like InShot as a mobile editing suite... it’s not brilliant, but certainly better than the alternatives... and one positive is no watermark which is useful for making videos.. *Other software is available.*

Awesome video.

As someone who's into camera stuff that's quite experienced in terms of video production on Adobe Premiere, watching this reminded me when I was starting out with Sony Vegas on my 12-15 year-old laptop that I brought in the early 2000s. It was quite an experience, the keyboard's mushy, the screen's brightness terrible, the device's barely could handle any color grading on the footages due to it having outdated specs (at least to today's standards). Compared it to now where I'm using Premiere on a fairly reasonably configured iMac, it was a stark differences. Was it possible? yes. Was it an enjoyable experience? no. Was it unconventional? yes. But most importantly, was it budget saving? yes.

This is the kind of stuff I live for (yeah pretty sad I know) but I love seeing people trying to do crazy things on cheap computers. As I write this on my laptop that cost $300 and upgraded for $70.

11:22 reminds me of Michael MJD with the background music haha

My RU-vid setup: Hardware: - Realme X2 Pro phone, 12GB of RAM, 256GB storage for both recording and editing - FeiyuTech Vimble 2 gimbal for stabilization - RØDE's SmartLav+ lavalier microphone for smartphones. Software: - Open Camera for recording (uses RØDE's mic) - Kinemaster for editing (best app, frequent updates, built in asset store) - Cut+Mix Studio and PixelLab for thumbnails (they compliment each other very well) - runwayml.com for AI rotoscoping (fast and automatic) I'm very happy with how easily and quickly I can edit videos. On the go too. With one hand if I wanted to. I used to commute by bus to and from work and edit with one hand holding the phone and the other holding the rail. It has been years since I edited anything using my PC. I bought these and other things like lighting setups and greenscreen over time but most importantly I changed phones over the years. I started my RU-vid with LG G2 Mini, then moved to Huawei P9 through P10 Lite and now Realme.

Hey! I'm a big linux fan. In-fact, I'm using it as a daily driver, without any version of windows in my PC! It's really nice once you get to know it, but it's really hard to convert everything into it, but in my opinion it's much better than Windows. Good video!

these little boxes are actually pretty nifty. i know a friend managed to reverse one and control his familys tv channels by fiddling around with a cheap one. Its all really impressive but definitly coding wizardry to me xD

Some of my videos I did edit on an android phone using powerdirector. it was hard work working on a tiny screen but I didnt have access at the time to a windows computer.

2:22 More and more sellers on AliExpress does deliver from local warehouses, sometimes you can pick from what country to deliver it from.

Shrimp you do wonders for my peace of mind

I had a keyboard that was very similar to yours, but it was branded Rii, but I'm guessing that it's a rebranded generic remote

I bet this thing would make a kickass little retro emulator box. Very similar hardware to my RG351V.

When I was in the hospital and didn't have my computer, I amused myself by coding little Python games on my tablet with PyDroid. It surprised me how much it resembles a netbook, if you have a mouse and keyboard connected.

I actually used your editing style as inspiration for a video I made

Ive had a couple of these no-name tv boxes. The hardware is ok but the software is usually borked in some way or other. Avoid the frustration.

I have to admit. It seems to be a pretty ok little box and hardware for that money.

Oh wow! U r spilling the secrets

For it's age, the RK3328 is a rather powerful little SOC. It has an ARM Cortex-A53 CPU so it should be 64-bit capable. With 4gig of ram that's enough for a nice Linux install. Drop a USB WIFI adapter and a USB 3 NVME enclosure and it could be a decent little setup. But by then you have spent enough for a used first or second gen Intel Core i3/i5 system which would slaughter it.

Thanks to the absurd prices of hardware today, this is what I have to do on my phone if I have to edit video. One suggestion for those lucky enough would be a Raspberry Pi 4. As ExplainingComputers showed in his PiWeek video, the latest models are powerful enough to edit video. A slightly more expensive variant of that would be their model 400, which is the Pi 4 built into a case with a keyboard. The more expensive variant of that gives you everything you need to get started with you just having to have a monitor to plug into. App wise, the one closest to an actual NLE is Kinemaster. Unfortunately, the free version is heavily limited and leaves a watermark on every video you render using it. There's one way of running Linux with Andronix, but you have to rely on a cumbersome method of vnc into your own installation because termux doesn't support hardware acceleration. It's weird that this is not a thing yet, considering many phones and tablets nowadays are more powerful than some PCs.

i have a 4gb ram 64gb rom versión and its unexpectedly good

Budget editing is always a pain. I guess, like you say, 'if it's your only option' I swear by DV Resolve too, but this box would be a very handy thing to have plugged in to your main tv set for surfing youtube easily, but £30 just to surf YT is a bit expensive.

Gotta love cheap asian tech. Some sellers actually handle quality items, just gotta find a reliable merchant.

Mike ; spends 30 pounds Me ; watches intently Mike ; owns the internet and all was right in the world

I subbed just because you brought the black rubber feet 🤣

I look forward to seeing a video like this but with a raspberry pie.

Hopefully some slow tv fireplace edition is on its way after loading that video 🤞

A cheap MacBook like a 2012 Pro (which are upgradable SSD/RAM) and iMovie could do very well due to the optimisation, would cost you around £150-200. Then if you like it you could spring for upgrades and Final Cut Pro.

Have a very similar keyboard to use with my laptop when im usong a projector or something similar does exactly what it says on the tin, tbh.

The only thing you have to watch out for is that there are different versions of Android. You get full blown Android, Android TV and Android Go, the latter 2 are cut down versions of the full Android. One of the limitations is that they don't have the proper app store, but to make the boxes look legit the Chinese manufacturers install a bodged together app store that ether doesnt work or doesnt work as it should. Whilst these boxes should do what they are supposed to do, play stuff on your TV, they fall short at doing anything else.

This is a somewhat workable solution for an inexpensive setup... BUT, combine a Samsung S8 (or anything newer from Samsung that supports DEX) with a their DEX dock, keyboard, mouse, and display... and you have a something similar to this but with WAY more processing power. Might make the experience more efficient. There are other phones that also have similar desktop modes with the use of docks and adapters that can also achieve better results than the android boxes.

hm, if you are on a budget, i can't really think of much. i guess if you are trying to make videos like this (like irl video reviews) you could try to use your phone as a editing tool. adobe rush is free on the play store. and you could also use your phone as a camera too. but if you want to edit on a computer, with something like resolve, i can't think of much other then trying to use your computer or maybe upgrading it. i think laptops can have upgraded ram (not much of a laptop guy so i don't know) and if it is a desktop, you could do a lot. ram and a cpu is something that comes to mind when i think about updating a editing mashine. and if you read all of this, hope you have a good day.

There are really good and cheap HDMI capture cards on Aliexpress. I bought one myself and the quality of the output is comparable to the pricy Elgato and AverMedia ones. You could give those a try or maybe even review them. Saved me a lot of money.

Here is fun experiment for you. You can find used LG V30, perhaps even with damaged screen, the cheaper the better. Get a USB type c dongle with HDMI, connect it to monitor, add mouse, keyboard and plug in charger and you get even more powerful setup than the box. 4GB of ram, SD card slot, 4 year old flagship SOC SD835 with performance similar to SD720 / 735 iirc. If only these devices supported NTFS file system, I could set it up as movie downloader for external HDD due to ARMs low power consumption.

It's possible you needed to do something in the android settings to tell it what to do with the sdcard, to get it to mount. It depends on how the device is configured, but on a lot of phones, a fresh sdcard prompts you to either use it as external storage or "merged" with the internal storage. Presumably a USB thumb drive would work, but an external hard drive (see the cheap sabrento USB->SSD adapters) would probably be much faster.

I have that same wireless keyboard from Rii, and you just charge it instead of replacing batteries every time

That's a weird keyboard. Lol

It probably came in as a part of bulk shipment to a remailer in the uk

Cool, actually catch a video near its time of uploading....

Phones are becoming more and more powerful these days. I feel one could potentially get more usability and performance out of something using their old phone as well (using an otg hub with HDMI and PD support). One could also root their phone to get more customisability. One could even use their current phone. I love buying things, but I've realised that if I really want to buy what I wanted, I'd need to save up money, and that included me not buying things that I didn't necessarily need, including things I'm curious about. That said, buying this, you still have something to plug into the TV so it could be justified.

Ive got a mad catz MOJO and now have the best of both worlds, a little device for emulator gaming and since i upgraded the OS its a mini computer and entertainment center for streaming the controller is very high quality and looks like a XBOX controller but has a mouse mode which is excellent and you can use it on any other device too

I use Sony Vegas, and if you feel like testing it out, it's currently available from the Humble Bundle (I don't mean to advertise them, sorry) and I swear by its functionality.