What made you purchase the Tablo TV system if you’re not interested in its DVR capabilities and from what I understand, you only want to watch OTA station – why not plug the antenna into the back of the TV? You can watch FAST channels through almost any devices. And if you do want a DVR-like devices for OTA only, any $30 PVR will work for that.
The Tablo is sold as an internet device. Sure, they might get around to less “calling home” … but you’d still need a powered wifi/ethernet connection to use it anyway…
I never said DVR only solution. But when watching linear TV, the selection, spinning up of a tuner, and buffering usually takes much longer then a traditional TV tuner.
What is the size of an OTA radio frequency. Since a broadcaster are not allowed to encroach upon a neighboring frequency the bandwidth could be reduced by 25%-30%. And the U.S. uses 8VBS modulation that further reduces the bandwidth
Several reasons. 1. TV Antenna is located on my roof, no coax cable going to it without some additional work that would be expensive. 2. No where and I mean No where in the advertisements does it say it is a internet device. 3. I am located in a very rural area, power often goes out, and while I have a generator I do not back feed my providers equipment. So that being the case when storms roll through, it is nice to see what is going on…
“I always though tablo was sold as a DVR solution.” - I was interrupting this as you were suggesting it as such, none the less. I suppose one could look up the actual amount of bandwidth consumed by OTA channels and figure out the possible amounts, but given I see a large number of channels lined up by folks that are much closer to a broadcaster then myself I’d say that is a rather trivial point.
OTA is a needed item for those of us that live in areas that are quite rural and if one doesn’t have the luxury of internet being 100% on all the time (especially in those situations such as environmentally challenging say for instance a tornado or the like) then this device (Tablo) is not truly a replacement for OTA as is suggested by their various ads. Oh and btw, yeah you were right there are better solutions available, i.e. HDHomeRun so thanks for prompting that. I suppose folks are herding towards having a dependency on the internet, or third parties for their luxuries these days, just hope folks know what to do when the lights dim, coughcoughcough CrowdStrike coughcough…lol
I set mine up to try it last night via Ethernet. I tried about 20 times today to change it to wifi so I can move the location of the Tablo. Well, it would not work. I called support and after having me repeat the same steps another 4 times, he puts me on hold and comes back to finally tells me it will not work on a mesh system with wifi. OMG, why can’t they just disclose that in the first place.
I own both a HD connect duo and a 4-tuner kickstarter 4K. But I thought they never claimed to work with the internet down. And that they were working to make that happen. So I have never tried it. But with HD you don’t know if they are talking about the total solution versus linear TV using just the HD apps.
But when I was young and things were that bad we use to go out to the back 40 to see if aliens had landed.
Mine legacy unit has been running on Mesh system on wi-fi for years. If it’s truly a mesh system (as opposed to a repeater that uses different network names), it should work fine. The table has no idea it’s on a mesh system…it just connects to the strongest signal.
That is what I thought but this is what support’s excuse was today. I told him I have 44 devices running and never an issue with anything. He may have been too lazy to continue. I really think I just have a bad unit. Bad WiFi receiver. And yes, it’s a true mesh system, not repeaters. Google mesh
The previous version of this (Gen 2), was capable of being used without the internet (to a degree) and also had an interface to use via a web browser (PC/MAC/Linux), so it is interesting that these features/abilities disappeared with the new Gen 4 version. Something tells me this was by design as porting over code from one version to another isn’t a mammoth task and actually making it function with reliance on the internet is more intentional. Case in point, Step 1. a=1 + 1, Step 2.Check if I can get to api.tablo.com Step 3. if I cannot get to website display Fail and exit otherwise Step 4.Print out $a.
So in summary your adding additional code just to justify internet connectivity
And I know the above is a very crude representation of this, but it’s really just that simple. Now I do know that with ATSC 3.0, there is a dependency on the internet to decode this and such, but that’s a bit down the road here, and not specifically relevant to this item. I’m going to start a new thread as this is getting well off topic from the original post/question.
You do realize that the legacy devices used the vivx cpu, software stack and api’s to accomplish the real work. The gen 4 doesn’t use vivx - which was bought by pixelworks.