There is no question that the Tablo seems a bit confused about sub channels in that it doesn’t support them unless they are treated as separate “Tuners”.
The point is, that, no matter how Tablo reacts to sub channels, the fact is that a single physical “tuner” is perfectly capable of receiving any and all the sub channels from the SINGLE transport stream simultaneously. It’s up to something downstream of the tuner to demux and sort out what goes where.
I’m quite willing to accept the limitations of the Tablo in this regard. My guess is that it runs out of steam trying to decode the MPEG and re-encode to H264 for more than 4 streams at once. It’s “convenient” to simply say that it uses separate “tuners” for sub channels when it may just be that it’s throttled to only do 4 simultaneous “recordings” at once. In actuality, it seems that there’s no such thing as a “live” stream on a Tablo, everything is recorded and a “live” stream is just a playback as soon as possible from the recording. I suspect that the Tablo limits everything incoming to the magic number of “4” and Network limitations throttle the outgoing to “6”.
Not really. Your Tablo is a 2 tuner or 4 tuner model, and that determines how many incoming shows can be recorded/watched live at once.
The network limitation is a guideline, not a hard rule. There is no error message for watching on 7 devices at once.
Tivo likely works in the exact same way. Each subchannel will be treated like a separate channel and use a tuner, though I would like any Tivo users to confirm or deny.
As I understand it, tuner in Tablo terms includes being a transcoder. So in theory a device (not the Tablo) that doesn’t equate transcoders to tuners (maybe separate CPUs), or doesn’t transcode could maybe record more than one thing happening on a channel and any of its subchannels with just one tuner.
But in Tablo’s case, the transcode process requires a “tuner” to do the work. In fact a “tuner” is requred for any work, not just associated with recording, generating thumbnails for example.
It is misleading for those who want technical explanations. It is simple and easy to understand for the every day consumer who won’t question how it operates.
I am recording 4 shows with 4 tuner Tablo at 8 pm on 4 different networks.
At 8:10 all 5 of us want to watch something. We are on my home network all atv’ and FTV’ are Ethernet over power line.
So I have 2 app le tvs in use. 1 fire tv in use. And an iPhone and iPad that want to watch either a recording or a live show.
In the scenarios above, is this possible with a 4 tuner Tablo as described above? 3 people want to watch live tv and 2 want to watch the mick recorded from fox and the othe blind spot recorded from NBC. All while recording 4 shows at 8 pm.
I just want to understand how this really works with the scenario above. I am not trying to piss anyone off or start an argument. I just want to understand this better.
In general, because there are lots of scenarios, a tuner is required to watch one Live TV and a tuner is required to record. That’s the general rule.
There are many scenarios though. Like when a remote person is watching Live TV at reduced rate where two tuners might be needed (just on example).
Precedence is given to scheduled recordings. So if a scheduled recording needs a tuner, it will take any available one, or worst case, grab one that is not being used for recording.
@cjcox: So, if I watch 3 shows at the same time, using 3 tuners, and the schedule to record 2 more channels kicks in, I would normally get booted out of 1 of the live shows being watched?
@cjcox: Hummmm. Thanks. I will test that out. It’s good to know. Frankly, I don’t see the day where I would have more than 4 things I want to watch happening at the same time.
You’d be surprised. Granted, I only have the 2-tuner unit, but I often times have to pick and choose what to record and what not too. TV stations compete, so they tend to put the shows you want on at the same time.
@Tom_C
I have seen 3 shows being recorded at the same time, but for us to also view 1 or more on top of what is being recorded… I am not sure it would happen to us. We don’t consume that much tv where many conflicts are less likely.
@cjcox: I can see it happen with 2 tuners, sometimes maybe. I chose the 4 tuners for the 1Gb of ram. I guess I did not estimate the extra 2 tuners properly. It may have been a wise choice in the end.
I just read all these posts and now my head hurts. My solution. I have my 4 tuner tablo. When I had my antenna installed, I had a line ran to the tablo and a seperate one ran to go to my 4 tv’s. So if I just switch the input to the antenna if the tablo need to record 4 things at the same time. I’m close to the towers so my signal is plenty strong.
