Copy recordings to new HDD

I don't see how that is a low bar - the device is functional. And it will only get better from what we've seen so far.

I guess patience is in fact a virtue.

A VHS-VCR meets most of your DVR criteria, does that put your bar into perspective?   Please spare us the commentary on virtue, Tablo is a commercial product, not a religion.  oldmike’s comments are dead on.    We’ll see what’s released next week.

Lol a DVR is a digital VCR no? Digital Video Recorder vs Videocassette Recorder.

And yes a commercial product that has in my opinion done what it has advertised. But I hope as well they give us more at CES next week. Maybe a new Roku UI, Tablo Connect for Roku, new Fire TV app, etc.

They do not need new customers as much as they need to attract serious investment, which would then be used for additional engineering resources, including project management.  It is just like the movie:  if they build it, viewers will come.  

I suspect they will receive a lot of interest at CES, perhaps that will attract investment

We’d LOVE to be able to plow through our to-do list but we’re limited by our people resources. A big wad of cash WOULD be pretty awesome and would let us hire a whack of engineers to really grind through some of this stuff. Perhaps a VC somewhere out there has 10 million burning a hole in his/her pocket. :) 

You are nitpicking features. You sound like the device doesn't even work at all.

Can you watch recordings? Yes.
Can you watch Live TV? Yes
Can you set up recordings? Yes.
Can you delete recordings? Yes.

All works fine on a Roku 3, iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPad Air and Nexus 5. All else is gravy.

If this is your criteria for a DVR solution, your bar is pretty low.    There are many here wishing for Tablo to succeed but they are going to need a lot more than your list to make it beyond being a niche hobbyist device.     Maybe they will suprise everyone next week at CES.

Some people assume that everyone has and uses all Apple devices but the fact is iPad is tiny compared to anything else. Android devices trounce Apple no comparison. Android is also more easily modified and more business friendly. Gravy indeed - for those who don’t own and do not WANT to own an iPad as an inflated price Tablo could be the greatest thing since TV itself if we could run the device as easily and simply from any other device/computer and so on. iPad is fine but honestly in the world of tablets and computers they are small. They are a consumer unit aimed at non-tech people while Tablo is actually to be more popular among geeks and tech folks who like to poke around under the hood and modify and combine. Apple aims products at consumers who can break things, it’s a locked down hard and tight device so it’s really something you’d find folks who would look at Tablo owning. It’s like saying VW Beetle owners are also likely to have large campers. No, large campers are most likely owned by pickup owners. I see Tablo that way - it’s a rare device that fills a need that is not filled by other devices or technology and being able to control and manage it by other devices that are likely owned by the same TYPE of person is a good path for them. 

It’s psychology and marketing 101. Geeks, gadget people, hacker-types, coders, they likely own something other than iPad. And that’s the same sort that is most likely to own Tablo since it’s not a plug and play device, you must stream to a device, you must provide your own hard drive. That’s not Apple people, that’s people more like me - I’ve got drives sitting on shelves and in cupboards, I throw away drives others would love to have. I’ve tossed 4 brand new still in the box mother boards into the recycle bin. I build my own computers, I’ve built computers for high-end turbo control equipment destined for Eastern Europe, iPads just don’t appeal to me at all - I want a device I can play with and mess with and change and add my own stuff and get to a command prompt and run things. I literally LOVED the fact that the Tablo did NOT come with a drive and that it did not cable to the TV. I prefer to not be tied down to a choice someone ELSE made on drives and connectivity or a device that was stuck tethered to a specific TV.
So Tablo would appeal to more consumers like me if they supported more NON-Apple devices.  They’d FAST broaden their appeal. 
I based that a lot on my old psychology and marketing classes… granted there’s opinion in there, but it’s opinion based on successful business ownership as well.
(I bought a business and inside of a year doubled the gross numbers - knowing the customer, the consumer, marketing, customer service, we did what the prior owner was unable to do and in the process put at least 2 others out of business)
We'd LOVE to be able to plow through our to-do list but we're limited by our people resources. A big wad of cash WOULD be pretty awesome and would let us hire a whack of engineers to really grind through some of this stuff. Perhaps a VC somewhere out there has 10 million burning a hole in his/her pocket. :) 

Wish you had been around when I sold our business - I was looking for a place to invest some cash. it’s now spent or otherwise invested otherwise I bet 100K could have gotten you at least one EE. Instead what wasn’t invested was blown on my hobby of classic cars. (and spent having fun)
Honestly, CCC hired engineers and developers from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe, as well as India and so on and got some of the finest in the world. 

Copying to a new HDD: Okay, I managed to do it, but it’s a pain.

When I first got my quad-tuner Tablo, I mindlessly grabbed a disused 500GB hard drive, threw it in a an disused powered USB enclosure and plugged it in. It was immediately recognized and formatted with no difficulty, but little did I know at the time how picky Tablo is about hard drives. The performance of the drive (a Maxtor MaxLine Pro 500 3.0Gb desktop-workstation class drive in a SIIG USB 3.0 enclosure, btw) was unexpectedly sub-par, but it did work. The main limitation seemed to be that throughput was so limited that I couldn’t record more than two shows at a time, even though I had a quad-tuner. I was able to live with that, with the expectation that I’d soon be swapping out the 500GB drive for a larger one in the near future.

Then the other rude surprise; there’s no built-in way to transfer content from one drive to another, even though there are two USB ports provided. I had fully expected to be able to plug a newer, larger (and more compatible) drive in, and then be offered a prompt like “Would you like to copy your content to the new drive?”. I consider this a major omission for a consumer-ready product. After all, hard drives do not last forever, and it’s inevitable that one is going to fail, or users are going to want to upgrade their capacity when they figure out how quickly HD content sucks up mere gigabytes.

Well, it did come to pass that my 500GB drive started to fail. So I acquired a “Tablo approved” WD Elements 2TB drive as a replacement. I then set out to transfer the contents of my old drive to the new one with the following procedure:

First, I plugged the new drive into the Tablo, and allowed Tablo to format it. After formatting, I connected both drives to my WindowsXP test rig and installed the Ext2 Linux volume manager. Both were immediately recognized by Ext2, and assigned drive letters. I copied the entire contents of the “rec” folder from the old drive to the new one. This took some time, since the old drive would experience read failures every hour or two, and I’d have to figure out where it stopped, and manually restart the copy procedure from there. (Content is stored numbered folders of 5 or 6 digits) Because of the stop-start nature of this operation, it took the better part of a week for me to get a complete copy. I estimate that had it not been for the repeatedly failing drive, the copy procedure would have likely been completed overnight.

After all sub-folders of the “rec” folder were copied, I plugged the new drive back into the Tablo and fired it up. It’s worked flawlessly ever since, and the WD Elements drive appears to perform much better than the previous drive.

IMHO, in its current stage of development, I can’t consider Table a “ready for prime time consumer product”. Architecturally, I believe it to be an excellent concept. (Multiple inexpensive clients networked to a single DVR server) They had the foresight to include two USB ports, suggesting the intent to support more than one hard drive. But having to resort to hacking skills to deal with this inevitable problem makes it hard to recommend this device to mere mortal users. And with 4TB drives now becoming common, a 2TB limitation is so 2012.

@TabloTV Any update on this? I see you were working a fix in 2014. It’d be nice if I could transfer my library to my new hard drive.

Thanks.