JerryG said: I use my Homeworx for recording programs where 5:1 matters most like musical specials, etc. For most of my viewing I don’t miss it.
How does that work? Do you plug that in before the Tablo? After??
It is a separate DVR. It doesn’t connect to the Tablo at all.
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Was watching “Celtic Women: Destiny” (PBS) on the Homeworx the other night. Great picture, super sound, beautiful music.
BTW talking about flash vs drive for the Homeworx. I noticed that even with a 3.0 USB flash, I would still get an occasional hiccup. Several weeks ago I noticed a guy running on the ten yard line and a millisecond later he had scored.
So I looked again at the flash vs drive issue and noticed people saying that drives have a larger buffer area. So speed isn’t necessarily the only factor in recording streams. I replaced my 3.0 flash with a 2.0 drive I had handy and no hiccups at all. However this drive has a large buffer cache that compensates for fast streaming.
I know you have a super fast flash. Mine was fast but not the fastest.
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Can’t beat pure OTA HDMI. I’m using a USB 3.0 128GB SanDisk “Ultra”. Plenty of storage for hours of playback. I noticed the Homeworx specs limited storage to 64 GB. Not so. Working beautifully, nary a hiccup. Forget what I tried previously but it was a disaster.
Love the portability of a flash drive. I load it up with recordings from Homeworx then plug in and play back on PC via VLC media player when I"m on the road. As you say, great pic.
Homeworx is a separate DVR selling for 29.95 on line. Kinda clunky, single channel only, and not very user friendly but ultimately gets the job done of recording OTA with direct HDMI output for great recording quality with 5:1 audio and instantaneous live channel switching. I’m using 1080I resolution which is max for my somewhat ancient 50" plasma (still tops IMNSHO). .
Quite a few guys here, like myself, are using it to supplement their Tablo experience.
Fills in some gaps that are glaringly absent from Tablo…
I don’t know how you feel about chains the Tablo puts on a drive, but like you I love the freedom of unplugging storage from the Homeworx and plugging it in elsewhere. The song and dance one has to go through to replace or upgrade a drive on a Tablo, the inability to take it out of the Tablo and stick it in another machine is positively North Korean! I though the whole idea of USB was stick it in and pull it out anytime anywhere without fear and trembling.
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Does Tablo ever hear our requests for feature updates, ect? Have my Tablo since July 2016 but wish for two things to be corrected. First is volume is SO Low. Second is no surround sound on recordings. Please, Please Tablo, fix these things soon! Thank you.
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Yes, they do hear our requests. But based on their responses, it is unlikely they will do anything about either one of these issues. The volume issue does not affect everyone, and the surround sound is just too difficult to do.
They hear but do not necessarily obey. I’d say “fix” is inappropriate since you gotta have something to begin with to fix. Volume issue has been kicked around here and the majority do not share (myself included) your problem. As for surround sound, well Tablo is what it is and that feature is presently off the table/Tablo.
I use a very inexpensive separate DVR for 5:1 audio. It’s clunky, unrefined, and very basic, but ultimately gets the job done. It comes with a direct HDMI output to your TV which makes for instantaneous live channel switching while delivering excellent picture quality as only non encoded OTA signals can. Many others here use it for the same reasons - Homeworx.
Time to shop for something else. Thank you for the responses.
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Might want to look into the TiVo Roamio for only $200 with Lifetime sub, it should fulfill what you are looking for. Sale ends today I think.
Two and a half years of this thread and still no AC3 support!?! Wow that’s just weak sauce. Was all excited about this product -about to pull the trigger and buy 3 of the 4-tuner puppies from Amazon with the discount and give 2 as gifts but then I read about the lack of 5.1 support. Sure I’d be willing to take a flyer on the hardware in hopes that it would be a simple firmware update but if over 2 years of dev has been put into this device already in supporting platforms and this is so low on priority, chances are newer wifi standards and cheaper improved cpu/memory will probably come out forcing them to release an upgraded box before they add in 5.1 support. I can’t give something like this to my friends and family.
Tablo, Bell Labs from the early 20th century called. They want their audio tech back. Hit me up when your Product Management team gets their ears back, and decide to get serious about going prime time with this product. Until then a couple of Channel Master DVR+ will have to do.
cheers,
Dan
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That is a seriously good deal for a four tuner OTA DVR (and frankly, one of the very best OTA DVRs)…
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Good. Tablo needs to hear from more users like you.
They’ve openly said it’s hard to do, but it’s somewhere on the bottom of the roadmap because it’s hard to do and they don’t think there’s a lot of interest. If the interest in 5.1 soars, Tablo is more likely to do it.
Whether that’ll still be Tablo 1.0 is a different question.
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Yeah, it’s an amazing deal. I bought one and set it up yesterday. Frankly, I was blown away at the speed of the UI and the amount of features. Instant commercial skip is a beautiful thing - it’s like Hulu commercial free but for every show and you don’t have to wait until the next day to watch! Sound and picture quality are top notch as well.
It’s a bit for bit copy of the original MPEG-2 OTA stream…so it’s as perfect as what was broadcast. The net result is a little sharper image than the highest bitrate Tablo recording…at the sacrifice of much larger recording sizes (so less recordings per GB of hard drive capacity) - and the inability to stream out of home, or to your phone app, without the additional Tivo Stream add on device.
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Is the commercial skip on the Roamio available immediately after the recording ends? I heard that Tivo will have to scan every recording and mark the begin and end of each commercial break and therefore it will take some time and it’s not available to every program (mostly prime time shows only). Is that true?
Skip is available a short (but undertermined) amount of time after the show airs…And yes, TiVo has people actually marking the commercial breaks, which seems to keep them out of court over auto commercial skipping.
So does it mean that commercial skip won’t be available for local programs such as the local news in the evening or at night? (Since it will be impossible for Tivo to scan the news recording for every city in the US.)