Right out of the box, the gen 4 is more trouble than it is worth. I spent 2 hours trying to get it to work. Installed and unistalled apps on my phone and Ruko several times to make it work for a short time, and it crashed again. It had trouble connecting to my devises. Tried to watch a program, and it kept buffering. Total waste of time and money. Thankfully, I bought it from Amazon, and they accept returns. DO NOT BUY!
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Not an owner, just an observer, and so… this is a wild guess. I think there quality problems. Why? Because it seems very hit or miss, and has zero to do with Roku, etc. whether you will have a great experience with the new units or a bad one.
Now, I could be wrong. But seems to me like some purchased units are “bad” out of the gate.
I’m sorry you’re having such a rough time. Have you contacted Tablo Support through their online form or a phone call?
This forum is a great place to reach out to other users who are very willing to help. @TabloTV is here about 5 days a week and if there’s something specific going on that users can’t help with, or if your Tablo is defective, they’re usually very willing to see what they can do.
However, some have struggled with getting the device up and running. A few tweaks here or there and a real look into your network/setup are usually all it takes to get things going.
Again, I understand your frustration and am sorry to hear that you’re not enjoying your device. Good luck!
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Sorry you are having problems but Tablo is not trash. Is it perfect? No. Does it get better with each update? Yes. And WELL worth the $79 I spent on it. I have found the Tablo Team to be much more responsive than many other tech companies that take your money and run.
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@Royce_Meier Sorry to hear you had difficulty with setup.
In the early morning hours we did have planned maintenance that would have prevented the setup of new accounts and Tablo devices:
You can try again now.
If you attempted setup at a different time support would be happy to walk you through the steps and get you up and running: www.tablotv.com/support
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I’m not criticizing, I’m trying to be helpful with the little information we have about your setup. How is your Tablo connected to your router? Is it through wifi or an ethernet cable? Personally, I feel that a wifi connection should be limited to a very good wifi network or close to the router.
It’s possible you have a unit that is defective. With the buffering, that leads me to believe it’s your wifi network. My understanding of the 4th generation is unlike past Tablo models, the new Tablo 4th Gen will not transcode video while watching live TV and, instead, stream the native MPEG-2 video. This means that the live video quality from the Tablo 4th Gen should be the same as the quality you would see if you connected your antenna directly to your TV. This does, of course, mean that both the WiFi connection to the Tablo and the WiFi connection to your streaming device are solid with enough speed to handle the full-quality MPEG-2 broadcast. The HDHomeRun as an example doesn’t transcode and thus requires an ethernet connection. Doing some speed testing at your streaming device would be a start.
I have read about similar issues with other people’s setups. In fact a few people have returned and exchanged multiple devices and have the same recurring issues. I install antennas on the side. There is technical knowhow that’s involved with that, but it’s different than a few decades ago where you ran a cable to the TV and called it a day. This year I installed 4 antennas and my customers chose Tablo over the HDHomeRun because they didn’t either want to deal with a server or having the knowledge to use one. My personal recommendation is to use a quality mesh network. One person has a smaller home and chose to use the router from Spectrum. In her case I wasn’t that concerned because her internet access point was close to her only TV and the Tablo was connected by an ethernet cable. I have not had one complaint outside of minor device bugs. I hope you can figure out what is happening. The device is fantastic. I retired my Legacy unit. The picture is better, the guide is 10X better and the 4th generation is much faster because of the transcoding improvement.
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Keep it real dude… sorry you had issues. But you were probably not techie enough to get it up and running. You need some skills and fortitude to make it work. It’s not 100% plug and play.
The forum users could have help or even Tablo Support…
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