The MECOOL M8S Pro L is an interesting little device that offers a lot of features for a very affordable price. It's one of the first TV boxes to run Android TV - Google's TV friendly OS based on Android and it uses Amlogic's powerful S912 chipset. But does it live up to the hype?
The box comes with a full 2.4Ghz WiFi antenna for high speed connectivity. It also supports Miracast and DLNA to make it easy for you to share content with other devices on your network. It supports external storage drives too allowing you to use SD, MMC and SDHC cards as well as USB disks and flash drives. It's also got a standard RJ-45 Ethernet interface that supports up to 100 Mbit LAN speeds which is about as fast as you can expect from an entry level TV box.
Unlike most other Android boxes that run the normal Android operating system designed for smartphones and tablets, this runs Android TV which is much more TV friendly and has some neat features like the leanback launcher and app recommendations from services such as Netflix. It comes with a few apps pre-installed including a YouTube client, AirPin Pro for AirPlay mirroring and StbEmu for IPTV use.
The media playback performance was excellent using the pre-installed fork of Kodi with hardware accelerated playback of mp3 and flac files. Even 4K video files (10bit HEVC) played back flawlessly too. This made the MECOOL M8S Pro L a great choice for those who want to turn their TV into a media center.
