Ok so I had change of heart at the store and went for a Nexus Player instead of the Roku 3 because of various personal preferences and I am very happy with the results. Playback of recordings on the Tablo app are very smooth and start about as fast as stuff on Netflix with no pauses or buffering. I’m sure the Roku 3 would have worked fine too. So it definitely seems the bottleneck was the Chromecast itself.
Only thing I’d like to mention to Tablo support is that there really should be something on the box saying Chromecast is only supported to 720p. In my case I didn’t mind getting a different device to play back on that allows 1080p but other people might not be very happy about it.
I’d probably be a nexus owner myself if it wasn’t for that darn invisible ethernet port. I’m glad to hear you got that worked out and things are working well for you.
Can you please try the 2.4 GHz band and see if it works? If it does, then that would mean your router is adequate, just the antenna in the Chromecast is not.
I think it’s actually lack of CPU processing ability on the Chromecast. The Tablo content seems to be much higher bitrate than other HD content for things like Netflix and YouTube so the Chromecast can’t keep up. But that’s just speculation since I don’t know any of the inner workings of the hardware