After 15 years having one of the first generation Tablo devices, its internal drive finally died and I replaced it with a 4th gen.
Since the 4th gen does not support remote streaming anymore, has anyone had any luck with setting up a home VPN, connecting your Android/Apple device to that, and getting the new Tablo app to work remotely in this way? I was going to start work on this but didn’t want to waste time if it was a futile effort.
Thanks!
It matters on if your router supports VPN. I enabled L2TP VPN Server on my router. Then remotely connect my iphone per the internal VPN service. Also run internal Windows VPN APP with BlueStacks to watch Tablo on my Laptop.
I use a Wireguard VPN server setup on my router and have the client on my phone and it works great, except when the network I am on, like at a hotel, has a slow or so-so speed it gets choppy. If you have good cell signal it works great too.
I have also tried Tailscale as my router supports that too, but it only seems to work when I am using the node at my house as an exit node, which my router does not support. I figured this out by setting up Tailscale on my NAS and tested using it as an exit node. The app will load fine but watching OTA TV did not work. Watching the FAST channels did however. Really weird. BlueStacks Air works great on my Macbook Air as well over the VPN.
Didn’t want to see if your legacy model could have it’s disk replaced.
Wireguard was going to be my recommendation as well. Same basic concept as a VPN but it gives you a bit more control and I believe it’s a bit safer /easier to set up.
mjremijan
I also think it’s worth investigating adding a harddrive to the legacy Tablo which should be easy.
I’m not sure if you can rip shows yet on 4th gen but for my Legacy I have a script that rips shows automatically. Then the content gets added to Plex. Then I can just use Plex’s streaming features to stream outside the home. The reason Plex is preferable to a VPN or WireGuard is the ability of Plex to transcode. The Legacy Tablo did this for streaming outside the home. This could be very useful with the 4th gen because it make high quality recordings that might buffer and lag without transcoding. There are also other great options Plex enables if you have a Plex pass like commercial skip, intro detetion, credit detection.
If not using Plex there are other ways to set up transcoding and commercial skip without a plex pass and for free if you can rip the content from the Tablo.
Unlike the Legacy Tablo, the 4th Gen does not perform any compression for the OTA signal. That’s why the image is so good on the local home network.
If you have a synchronous (fiber or similar) internet service, probably work well. But cable and many other internet services are asynchronous with fast download speeds but slow (in comparison to the download) upload speeds.
I don’t know, but suspect, that the 4th Gen development team figured that with so many slower upload speeds for a majority of customers that remote viewing might generate poor reviews. Leaving the feature out would be a negative mark but less than a large number of customers complaining.
Compressed video like the OG Tablo would be fine with 10 or 20Mbps connectivity.
Worth giving it a shot, but your connection and the connection you use remotely will determine the success.
I have comcast cable and have no issues with remotely viewing my Tablo G4 over my VPN.
The Tablo G4 generates about 20mbps OTA live/recorded. It runs about 10mbps with the Fast Channels.
The biggest concern with VPN is your router horsepower. If you buy a $50 router from wal mart, you will get $50 worth of performance. more CPU / MEM would make the VPN run better. Along with upload/download speeds.
I have a TP-LINK router - AX11000 to be exact and setup the VPN server using OpenVPN. I use a iPad with the OpenVPN app and able to connect an stream videos and watch live programs remotely. I also was able to send the video using airplay to a Roku 4k stick successfully and watched for couple hours with no more problems than I do a home. I have FIOS so my upload is fast, you may need to check your upload speed to make sure it is fast enough, I was seeing upto 3.5 MB/s settling to 1MB/s data traffic while watching.