Acceptable playback of 1080p from PC?

Support & Troubleshooting
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Wifi, why would anyone use wifi? ;)

It’s pure convenience and I know you were tongue-in-cheek with that comment, but honestly, it’s nothing but trouble for real hard-core work that involves a lot of throughput.


I found something interesting last night and it makes me REALLY ANXIOUS for Tablo to release their final Fire TV stick app - 
Of all the ways I can play recordings either on PC or through the TV, Fire TV blew the others away in quality, lack of jumping, pausing and so on. Fire TV stick is Wi-Fi but it still out-performed everything else I’ve tried.   Too bad that the app is side-loaded and lacking in several controls - hoping the REAL app has a way to exit shows when you are done watching them and not have to flip between mouse and remote and leave Tablo hanging in the background. 

For Chrome browser try changing the hardware acceleration setting and see what happens. Chrome has its own “quirks” with video, and I know I’ve already said several times that Flash just plain sucks so bad there aren’t words to describe it.
The Windows “task mangler” isn’t the best way to view Windoze performance - there are other apps that show or do a better job. As usual, the built-in Windows utilities are lacking and seldom tell the whole story. Procmon, regmon, perfmon and so on do better and there are 3rd party apps that might be more helpful than the built-in Mickysoft utilities. 

Hey, has anyone watched their drive sub-system performance on a PC when using Tablo to play video on or through a PC?  Just curious. 
Built-in video typically shares system RAM with the OS, and processing can be off-loaded to the CPU itself. A 4 gig system with an onboard video won’t have 4 gig available to the OS and apps. To have all 4 dedicated to the OS/apps requires a dedicated video “card” that doesn’t share system RAM or processing. 
How about those NIC settings where the NIC can off-load handling the traffic to the system CPU? There’s a lot to play with there especially with Intel interfaces. 

No offense, but seriously - Vista? Uh… we skipped right over that one for a lot of reasons. It was the most ill-behaved of the recent Windows systems. We had nothing but horrible luck with it network-wise, printing, video, etc. 
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@cjcox

Yes I totally get that PMS (Plex Media Server) is different than XBMC. The player in PMS is web based.

PHT (formerly Plex Media Center) on the other hand is a fork of XBMC, albeit it is quite different now, but hence the standalone player. And likely the reason for the OP’s different results.

The Tablo web app on a PC again is web based and uses Flash. Hence the similar performance to the playback in PMS.

@ShadowsPapa

Sideloaded Tablo on your Fire TV Stick? Performance is good so far? What router do you have? And what band are you running the Stick on, 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz?

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Yeah some really nice member here helped out with the Tablo Android app apk.

I got the file on my PC, copied it to my phone and installed an app on my phone meant for sideloading things to FireTV - it’s specific for that and looks for FireTV devices on your network.


Pushed and installed the app using that app on my phone.
(but found that you have to allow installation of apps from other locations and go into developer mode on FireTV stick first!)
I then wasn’t able to get the BT mouse to pair, so found a “settings.apk” file and sideloaded that from my phone, too, after downloading it to my PC. 
Once the mouse was paired and Tablo apk installed on the FireTV stick, and found that FireTV was registered to me already but they left it at Pacific time and fixed that, I accessed the Tablo app. Good results. 
My router is a Netgear 2200d. It’s fairly beefy, IMO, for a home router. It’s an N300 router and my notebook routinely connects at that and moves between 150 and 300. 
The downside is that it’s a 2.4 Ghz only router - no 5Ghz option,  but that’s not been an issue for us so far. We don’t have much in the line of other wireless devices or at least none that cause us issues. 
Tablo is wired to the ports on the router (it has 4 10/100 Ethernet ports and Tablo is wired directly to one of those, another goes to my Cisco switch which runs the main computer in my downstairs office)
I let the stick connect to my Netgear router -  it did so quickly after I fumbled the remote to get my complex password entered in the stick!  The router is 3 feet from the FireTV stick with only the TV’s back between them. So, it’s FireTV stick wireless to router, router wired to Tablo.
That has to be better than: 
Tablo wire to router, 
router WiFi to notebook PC or phone; phone or notebook PC WiFi to Chromecast. 
That’s traffic to and from a PC or phone WiFi, double traffic where the stick is only WiFi from router to stick. 1-way traffic so to speak instead of double-WiFi as I refer to it, technically correct or not.
The interface is clumsy as you can’t easily exit a show you are watching then decide to pause, but the performance was better than expected.
I could do a direct comparison between using the FTV stick and Chromecast, for example. A show that was nearly unwatchable via PC and Chrome was perfectly steady, rock solid even with the occasional pixels it had due to prior antenna issues. 
Tablo recorded show to FireTV stick was about as good as watching live through the TV itself and was better than watching it from a DVD recording. 
I have very high hopes for this combination as long as they product a good application specifically for the FireTV devices. If that happens, this should be a great combination with great performance, especially if you check out the FireTV specs.

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