I recently purchased the new Tablo since it added Apple TV support. I was hoping it was a worthy upgrade from our older Tablo which was having problems hanging during fast forwarding of a program being recorded. This started happening with the latest Apple TV OS.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem to handle one of our main use cases. We watch the 6 PM news at dinner, usually delayed by a few minutes so we can skip commercials,
Apparently there is no way to start from the beginning of a program that is being recorded.
“This player software is not able to differentiate between live streams and in-progress recordings as they both do not have specific start and end points.”
Wow. This seems like a basic feature. One that the older Tablos handled (albeit now buggy too).
@mpeirce Sadly, that is the case. I’m not the technical expert but it comes down to this – TV signals are encoded in a format that the AppleTV can read in real-time, or after a recording is complete. The AppleTV cannot decode time-shifted recordings still in progress.
Kills one of my main uses too - I love watching Football and starting about an hour late. That way I can skip the commercials
Note: I understand other boxes like the Roku supports the encoding so it can time-shift.
Tablo gen 3 supported transcoding. It received the TV signal in one format and in realtime, could translate it to an AppleTV-friendly format and relay the signal. Gen 4 cannot not do the realtime transcoding.
You’re joking, I assume. Tablo development resourcing has been starved since the Scripps takeover. I’d be surprised if they have a full headcount dedicated to AppleTV development.
My guess - the OTA DVR is not a super profitable, else someone would swoop in a capture it. Many have tried (Tablo, Homerun, Plex, Tivo) but sadly there’s no one in this niche fully funding development anymore.
I returned my 4th generation Tablo and hooked the QUAD back up, going to ride the ride as long as it lasts. Anyone wanting a Tablo should look to eBay for a legacy model.
I hear you. Based on what I read above, they had a lot bigger dev team back then, and that product was more fully baked.
However, the current (smaller) dev team is only working on the 4th gen; so, as time goes on the quad will lose its edge. Besides, you have to pay monthly to use the quad. I prefer to stick it out with the latest gen, and hope for the best! I mean, it mostly works, right?
Note: You only have to monthly to use the OG quad, if you missed the deadline to pay for a lifetime guide (back when that was offered). And of course, you don’t have to pay for the extended EPG, even in the most worst case, the OG supports manual recordings.
I am using both products. The older quad is fantastic when I’m out of town and want to watch TV outside my home. It has been working very well! Hopefully it will last forever.
The new fourth gen is great with the exception of playback during live recordings, which has been beat to death in discussions. It’s not a dealbreaker comes very, very close…
This seems very silly considering the 3rd gen products sounds to have supported this. I was using Channels DVR but decided that I didn’t want to pay for the service and was having trouble with my older server and didn’t want to spend the money to upgrade. The Channels DVR supports this feature seamlessly on Apple TV. So, this isn’t a technical issue with Apple TV. It sounds like this is a feature that the Tablo team doesn’t want to build and/or support.
I’ve been thinking about this excuse they keep giving about Apple TV not supporting native mp2 as the reason you can’t start playing from the beginning of a recording in progress. As I understand it, when watching live TV, the Apple TV app is getting mp2 from the device and doing the transcoding, right? On android, you can start from the beginning of a recording in progress, which presumably means the tablo is reading the mp2 out of memory and sending it to the android app, which forwards it to the android HW as is. But why can’t they do the same with Apple TV? Aren’t the live TV and the buffer output “play from beginning” both mp2 streams from the tablo box? Why would the apple app transcoder care if the input is from the live stream or the delayed buffer stream as long as it’s fast enough to keep up? The Apple TV app must be handling mp2 input somehow or you wouldn’t be able to watch and pause live TV and you can certainly do that.
