I’ll continue to follow this thread. I’m a DirecTV sub who’s been waiting for YEARS to cut the cord. I’ve been waiting patiently for a DVR/whole home/streaming solution that offers surround sound. I’ve tried Hulu, Sling TV, Playstation Vue, and DirecTV Now. I’ve looked into the Tablo and HDHomeRun Extend as options for streaming and DVR for OTA channels. Tablo seems the most promising, but alas, no 5.1, and from what it sounds like in this thread it is difficult to implement and won’t be coming anytime soon. I’m willing to throw money at the first company that can come up with a viable solution, allowing me to integrate OTA DVR with my Apple TVs and get 5.1 surround. If I have to choose between a 1080p picture with 2.0 audio and an upscaled 720p picture with 5.1 surround I’d pick sound every time. I know I’m different from most, but the lack of surround is the one reason I don’t have a Tablo now and why I check constantly to see if/when it will be implemented.
Here are a couple of questions for the Tablo team… could it support 5.1 for recorded content? Could 5.1 work with live tv with a 30 sec/1 min delay? Could it be done if you charged a little more for the hardware or monthly guide fee?
Doing a little research I found the “Channels” app for Apple TV and iOS. It requires an HDHomeRun, and it manages to preserve the 5.1 audio. From their FAQs:
How do I enable surround sound?
Channels supports full 5.1 surround sound automatically. If you’re not hearing surround sound, check your ATV settings:
There’s very inexpensive DVR I use as an adjunct to Tablo. It will give you 5:1, instant channel surfing, and an HDMI output for great OTA viewing. At the risk of sounding like a promoter I refer you to previous posts on the subject.
I’ve given up on my quest for cutting the cord and keeping surround sound, no live streaming service provides 5.1 sound. So I finally decided to sell my tablo quad and move on with a TiVO Bolt+. I honestly don’t have the time or patience to keep waiting and wasting money on solutions that do not provide the best possible way to watch tv.
Tablo worked great and has the freedoms I’m looking for but too many compromises and the most important one for me was surround sound, I’m done…
I am overjoyed to see that Tablo Droid finally has 5.1 audio. Does this also mean that you are capturing and using the raw full-quality MPEG2 stream, or are you still using lossy transcoding? I’m guessing that some of this uses the new DVR framework and APIs in Nougat to do the heavy lifting, no?
My point was simply to point out the importance of “sound”. If I were in the movie making business, I’d put more money in sound rather than things like special effects. It’s not that closed captions and just video aren’t good things, just that I think sound can make the difference ultimately over that (unless you’re deaf of course). Just my opinion.
I’d have to confirm with the engineering team but it’s unlikely as I’m not sure the software is designed for that. Plus, you’d probably run out of USB ports
There’s no transcoding with this setup so it’s definitely a 1 TV solution. If you want to watch on multiple devices or away from home, the original Tablo DVR is still the way to go.
HDMI gets you the fast channel changing and 5.1 sound, but you’ve gotta give up some cool stuff to get it.
I’d love to see a more scalable option, either via multiple USB tuners or network tuners. Being able to share the recordings across the network to other players would be of high value as well. It is not unreasonable to think that your customers have wired network capable of the full-stream bandwidth (I have GigE everywhere, as do most newer homes) and there are plenty of players on the market now that have the capability of handling MPEG2 decoding.
