Legacy tablo encodes on the fly. Good for storage . Good for remote streaming. Lacks instant gratification while surfing the guide. Ripper tool will produce portable file formats for the likes of plex. All in all a great solution for as long as the hardware stays alive. Loved the startup mentality at first. Ive been loving legacy tablo for 7 years. Customer support started out good but got worse as time went on.
Someone decided that encoding on the fly was bad in favor of lower processing power and a large storage requirement for mpeg. Good for instant gratification surfing the guide but bad for everything else in the original tablo value proposition. Storage is mpeg2 but the files are not accessible either directly or via 3rd party tools. No remote streaming due to bandwidth requirements.
Why again is new tablo a good thing? I really want to be wrong about transferring content from tablo to pc…
The #1 benefit to me is that 1080i sports looks really good on the 4th gen Tablo, compared to being so-so on the legacy Tablo. Native MPEG2 makes a difference there. Picture quality is pretty much the same in all other instances.
The 4th gen also has access to FAST channels, which can be a benefit, though I hardly ever watch them.
Original tablo actually transcodes video. It’s a technical difference and some may say it’s semantics.
If you want a library solution, ability to store collection on a non-proprietary device is a positive. If you just keep shows for a brief time, watch and delete, of course it doesn’t matter.
I believe while it was still Nuvyyo only, their customer base just grew and grew beyond their capacity, my speculation. Once a publically traded US corporation bought it, of course it’s all about return on shareholders investment - profits. That’s just how things work.
Legacy Tablo recording and playback at 10 Mb per second (highest quality) looks perfect to me. The lifetime guide they offered loads almost instantly as far as I’m concerned, and the Tablo connect away-from-home feature, as well as the ability to occasionally rip a recording for editing and playback outside the system are musts - much so that I bought an extra model as soon as the new one came out.