I’m exactly where you are on this @Canons900 and I’m looking for simplicity too. Just because our cord-cutting journey needed to have full family buy in I went the route of having Plex as our main UI so we have a single UI for movies, TV shows, etc, with Tablo doing all of the recording and Tablo Ripper getting all of it over to the NAS Plex is configured to use.
As you said, my dream as well is Plex someday supporting Tablo tuners. It would remove a couple of possible “failure points” and Plex does have some features that are useful for our household (easy offline sync for trips, etc.). Doesn’t hurt that we have a lifetime Plex Pass already.
It would seem that if you want your dream to come true you need to be posting on the plex forum. Maybe plex can buy up various companies in the OTA space.
No need to buy anything. Why can’t they partner up…
The interface is similar and the functionality is somewhat similar. Sure there are differences. But partnering up means one less hard drive for me. I don’t to get stuff off Tablo and into plex.
And I have there is offline sync and remote access is nice as well.
Really it’s about one interface and the comskip integration is another feature I’d be interested in.
My plex server has worked as well as my Tablo.
Look, plex has its warts and all, and Tablo has some as well. It would be interesting if it could work out.
Got my plex pass and a WinTV dualHD USB stick and started adding shows. One quick note, the calendar view (nice, just text) is really nice to get a quick overview of what is planned for recording.
I have set some for commercial removal. We’ll see. Nothing recorded yet, but nice interface so far.
One immediate negative, I cannot start watching a show at the same time it is being recorded. I see some notes here and there that it should be coming.
Live TV and recorded quality is very good, I have no complaints either with Plex or Tablo’s picture.
I did try a Nightly News broadcast with commercials removed. Did a poor job of it. Won’t be trying that again anytime soon.
Only other comment is when I do fast forward I have thumbnails enabled, (like Tablo, sort of, but pictures change in a static box not a horizontal stream – I like how Tablo does it more). When finding the spot I want and hitting play, it definitely takes longer to start playback of the video than Tablo does.
fast forward thumbnails, on the “preview” plex roku channel scroll across the screen just like Tablo, helps a lot
I have my Tablo set to 5Mbps recording, so I changed the Plex stream from 15.2Mb to 4Mb to the roku, Seems the restart time after FF is much improved. Many times instant, most times <2 seconds, like Tablo.
So far there are no showstoppers for me. The weekly view of what’s going to record is still the overall best feature of the Plex setup to me.
–I enabled commercial skipping on a “regular” show, not news, and it removed them perfectly.
–The calendar view has proved useful to make sure multiple recordings weren’t happening. When I saw Meet The Press was being recorded at two other times, I was able to quickly change the show recording parameters to record only a specific channel at a specific time. Looking back at the calendar view confirmed quickly the changes were correct.
–I like the program schedule broken into sections: On Right Now, New Episodes Tonight, Starting Soon, etc. The searching capability is very good, and I have found a couple other shows to record based off seeing them in the list. I think it actually is more useful than a grid.
So far then, the only real negative I have is not being able to watch a show as it is being recorded. Pretty minor. That only happens about 10% of the time with Tablo.
Have you tried the HDHomeRun app to watch live TV? I prefer it (for watching live TV locally) to Plex, and if you have multiple tuners, you can watch a show while recording. The app grabs the next free tuner and you’re good to go.
I am using a WinTV DualHD USB stick, which I don’t believe has the ability to stream directly to my Roku. I could always just watch the show live on the TV or through the second tuner, I guess, but the intention would be to be able to start watching the recorded one 15-20 minutes into the recording so that I could then skip the commercials.
There’s a reason why Plex (Plex Media Server) exists, and of course, why Plex DVR exists. That is to say, a Plex Media Server is an acceptable way to stream that which you thought was not streamable.
Exactly. HDHomeRun doesn’t have a Roku channel, but Plex streams to it just fine. Perhaps the WinTV stick works too? However, that’s not going to help @Corto with commercials.
What if you didn’t split the OTA connection to run both the Tablo and HDHomeRun? Aka connect the antenna directly to the HDHomeRun without any splitter in line?
With a splitter (Tablo on one side, HDHR on the other) I get 100% on all tuners stats on all channels using the HDHR web page. I tried a distribution amp just for the heck of it and the numbers actually went down. Back to the splitter.
Tablo is still 100% reliable, the HDHR (using Plex) is about 80-90%
