Any issues with non Tablo Apps

I’ve been poking around with my Tablo a bit and it looks like a lot could be done very easily. Do you have any issues with a 3rd party writing an application that interfaces with the unit? 

@davidvr - That’s technically against our end-user licence agreement. :slight_smile: What would you like to do? 

Well the layout of the recordings is very simple and the meta data is easy to read. I was thinking of writing a simple GUI application for downloading recordings for off line viewing, ideally:

- The application would scan for your tablo (or maybe initially, you would have to just put its IP in manually)
- List the recordings on your device and allow you to select a show for download (and transcoding)
- Pass the playlist to ffmpeg on the local computer and let it transcode the playlist segments to a proper .mp4 for a iPhone or dlna server and store it at a chosen location. 


@DavidVR - This is something we have on our to-do list so the dev team wants to know when you’re submitting a resume for our open iOS/Android positions :) 



@TabloTv I would love too but I’m pretty settled in south texas with 7 kids, but if they are interested, Its a very quick desktop application to write and the neat thing about having a computer doing the transcoding and downloading is the fact that none of the tuners need to be used to download the content because the actual recorded stream is being read and the computer is doing the transcoding on the CPU. I won’t post the specifics here but I’d be happy to share. 

The problem with 3rd party apps is that they’re very difficult to support and we can’t really provide functionality for ‘advanced’ users like you that leaves folks who aren’t programming experts in the dark. 


We will get this done - but we want to get it done in a way that is useful for all users. 

@tablotv Maybe you should consider an API to make that kind of flexibility possible? I really do wish I could come up and help, I think that despite the things that are missing, the in home experience is great, and that is more than I can say for the competition. I noticed that the streams aren’t upconverted so the 1080p setting just applies to 1080i signals I take it ? Does the encoding bit rate stay at 10Mbits then even for 720p streams? 


That’s correct DavidVR - We do not up
convert.  720p channels are recorded at 720P at 5 Mbps.


CORRECTION - our transcoding guy says:
The encoding bit rate is still at whatever the user
selects.  We can not up-scale, so the output resolution is simply limited
by the input broadcast resolution.  Using the 1080p profile, this means
that 720p and 480i broadcasts will still be allowed to encode at 10mbps, (but
the transcode would never require that many bits).


So, the community user is correct.  The 720p stream
would be using an encoding bit rate of 10mpbs at the 1080p setting.


Glad you’re enjoying Tablo so far!

 
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