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…
People focus too much on “picture”. You can “watch” a movie without picture, but without sound, not so much.
Wait, wut?
I watch without sound all the time.
Does noone else have kids, or kittens that need their naps?
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’m curious as well to know if the video format on the Droid is h.264 video or the native MPEG-2.
DROID is MPEG2 direct feed. There is no transcoding as the Shield is connected via HDMI to the TV.
This is very exciting, and is likely the product that many of us have been waiting for since the initial TabloTV release.
Will it be possible to connect multiple USB tuners to one Shield to allow viewing/recording more than 2 channels at once?
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 
Thanks! So will the recordings on the Shield using the Droid DVR software engine be watchable by other devices over the network?
Of course, said device would have to be able to playback MPEG2 video such as another Shield player.
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.
Well from the announcement, isn’t the intention for the DROID software DVR engine to be used with the Tablo Cloud DVR eventually?
It’s almost as if there’s no way to add more USB ports.
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.
CLOUD + LIVE, not CLOUD + DROID 
This is the problem with announcing so much stuff in one press release.
Thanks for clarifying.
I assume the Tablo LIVE is transcoding the video and audio like the legacy Tablo DVRs?
Lol guess I shouldn’t call them legacy if they’re still for sale.
That’s correct. Streaming = transcoding required.
And I like the name a customer on Reddit gave the Tablo DVRs yesterday… ‘OG Tablo’. 
Nice - I like the idea of the Cloud DVR very much. If the recorded format is the same as the original Tablo DVRs, why can’t the Cloud DVR be used with them?
Mostly it’s a processing/tuner availability/upload bandwidth issue. The ‘OG’ Tablo was designed to have connected storage. Uploading multiple streams of 720p/1080i data into the cloud at the same time is a lot of work. We want people to have a good experience and we just don’t think it would work the way we’d want it to.
It’d be like when you try to bring ALL of the bags of groceries into the house at the same time. The eggs invariably wind up getting dropped on the driveway and that’s just not cool.
Tablo Droid & Live are of no interest to me. I purchased my OG Tablo in order to have a whole home DVR system for OTA content. It would be nice to have 5.1 sound but for me it is not a deal breaker. I only have the surround sound system in one room any way. I suppose you could suggest that I get a Tablo Droid system for that room, but my deal is that I want all my content integrated in one system that is accessible from all 4 TV’s in my home.
Weird, my Plex DVR does DD5.1 without any issues…
