Tablo How to
By
Bill Eastman
Which Tablo
do you have / want to purchase? I have
the 4 Tuner Tablo, which will let you record up to 4 shows at the same
time. In addition to the Tablo, you will
need an antenna. Since there are both
“display channels” and “broadcast channels”, the easiest solution is to get an
antenna that is made for both UHF and VHF.
Most HDTV antennas are only made for UHF. An outside antenna is best, but the indoor
Winegard FL5500A FlatWave Amped Razor Thin HDTV Indoor Antenna is the best
indoor antenna I have found. You’ll also
need a USB 2 hard disk. The bigger, the
more you can record. The Tablo joins
your network and is a “whole house DVR”.
Tablo works with several over the top boxes such as Roku, FireTV. It also works with smartphones, and web
browsers. It has a program guide that is
$4.99 per month, $49.99 per year or there is a lifetime option of $149.99. The cost of EPG covers all the Tablos you
own. You can watch Tablo remotely using
anything except Roku anyplace there is internet, such as a friends house or
hotel. While stick versions of FireTV and Roku work, the Roku 3, and the
recently announced Roku 4 (the Roku 4 will support Wireless AC) or the FireTV
are best. What channels can you
get? Go to
https://www.tablotv.com and use the checker. You also might want to look at www.tvfool.com
What
is OTA Television
Prior to
cable becoming the normal way of watching TV, people used to use antennas to
receive FREE OTA TV signals. When cable
first got started, all the local stations wanted to be carried, so the FCC
instituted the “must carry” rule. As
time went on, the TV stations wanted the cable companies to pay them to
retransmit the otherwise free signal. It
seems annually that the TV station and cable company negotiate and sometimes
the home user is the victim being without the station for a short time. Due to this, cable bills over time have
increased substantially and is the main reason several people are dropping
cable TV and opting instead for internet only and OTA. If they go to their local Walmart, Amazon,
wherever and get either an indoor or outdoor antenna, they can watch the
station. With the digital TV transition
full power stations were required to be digital on or prior to June 12,
2009. Several stations have multiple
channels. The OTA antenna still works
and you can watch tv for free. OTA gives
a better picture, since it is not compressed. To watch TV using an antenna, you
need to connect it to the antenna connection on the TV and select antenna in
the source selection (every TV model is different). Instead of connecting the antenna to the TV,
it can be connected to a DVR. To get the
best use of your Tablo, I recommend the program guide. Without the paid guide you are limited to
just one day of guide data, making it hard to just “set it and forget it” for
recording series.
Hard
disk Selection
As of Tablo firmware 2.2.2, you can use just
about any size USB 2 hard drive, or USB 3 that is backwards compatible to USB
2. The Seagate Expansion Desk 5 TB has
been tested by Nuvyyo, a Canadian company, that is the manufacture of the Tablo
and works excellent. It is available at
Amazon and Newegg, as well as big box stores and E-bay. You might check E-bay first as Newegg
sometimes sells items there cheaper than on Newegg.com.
If your USB disk for your Tablo gets full,
or if you just want to upgrade to a larger disk without losing your recordings,
the process is below. Special thanks to
BabbleBits on the community.tablotv.com forum. If you don’t already have
EXT2FSD, you will need to get it and install it. It is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/
I did the following using Windows 10
removed the smaller Tablo USB
External Hard Drive from the Tablo.inserted the new 2 terabyte USB
external hard drive into the Tablo.Tablo saw a new external drive and
indicated that it needed to be formatted (which will wipe anything
previously on that drive clean off) in the Tablo Settings web page. I
typed the word FORMAT and it began formatting the new drive.When formatting was finished I
removed the new external drive from the Tablo and then plugged both the
old small external usb drive and the newly formatted large external usb
drive into my PC.I downloaded and installed a
Windows to Linux disk utility called Ext2Fsd and installed it.I started the Ext2Fsd program,
found the two external hard drives listed along with all the windows
drives. The two Tablo usb drives were listed as “ext3” Linux
drives. (Note that in my case, the Ext2Fsd startup-splash screen …
silhouette of a couple of penguins with a sunset-color background …
stayed open. I have enough screen real estate to work around that screen,
but I was not able to close it … perhaps there was something I missed,
but I didn’t dwell on it for very long, I just left it be). Using Ext2Fsd, I assigned new
Windows drive letters to the two external hard drives. The small drive
became the “D:” drive, and the large drive became
“E:”.Using Windows Explorer, I was able
to open and view the contents of both drives … the D: drive and the new
E: drive in my case.I opened the “rec”
folder listed in the D: drive and opened a new Windows Explorer window to
view the new E: drive (the new 2 TB external usb drive) and I opened its
“rec” folder as well, which was empty.I then dragged & dropped all
the folders in the “rec” drive from the small drive (D: in my
case) into the same folder, “rec”, in the new large external
(E:) drive.After a couple hours of copying,
all the recordings in the “rec” folder from the small drive were
now cloned into the “rec” folder of the new drive.In Ext2Fsd, I right-clicked on the
E: drive and selected the command for flushing any cached data to the
drive.I then dismounted the two usb
drives by selecting the usb plug symbol in the Windows Notification Icons
area. The icon on my computer was hidden, so to find it I selected the
little right-arrow to view all notification icons. The one I selected was
called “Safely remove hardware and eject media”. I ejected my D:
and E: drive (your drive letters may be different from mine).All done! I plugged the new 2 TB
drive into the Tablo. Tablo recognized it as a fully functioning drive
(since it was the Tablo that formatted it in the first place) … and all
of the previously recorded shows were present and playable.
It really wasn’t difficult … it just
took some time to format the new drive and copy the recordings from old to new.
Cable
Modem and Router Selection
According to thewirecutter.com the best
cable modem is ARRIS SURFboard SB6141 DOCSIS 3.0 Cable
Modem - Retail Packaging – White and the best router for most people is TP-Link Archer C7 (v2)
The cable
modem and the Router selection are very important and cannot be over
stressed. I strongly encourage you to
get the above. To simplify
troubleshooting and make the Tablo experience the best, I strongly recommend
using a static IP address for your Tablo…
To set a static IP address for the Tablo requires configuring your
router for DHCP Reservations.
Before Tablo
can be watched remotely, it must be paired locally. Sometimes when you update the app you have to
repair, so it is not recommended to update software when you are away from home.
Internet
Speed
The speed of
your internet connection is important if you are going to be a cord
cutter. While the Tablo itself doesn’t
use much internet bandwidth unless you are watching away from home, it is
required to download the Electronic Program Guide. The number of active channels you have on
your Tablo affects the speed of the EPG download. I recommend at least 50 Mbs down and 5 Mbs
up. You can go to www.speedtest.net to test your internet speed. See below for mine:
Support
Forum and Social Media
There is a
very active support forum for the Tablo and many members will try to help you
with your problem. In addition,
@TabloTV, @TabloSupport, and other Nuvyyo employees are active. Currently the tech support is limited to
Monday – Friday.
The URL is
community.tablotv.com and you will need to register to post, but you can read
anonymously. Tablo also has a Facebook page
and a blog
Community
Applications
Several
excellent community applications have been developed to enable you to copy
recordings from your Tablo to your computer.
You can then edit them and use MCEBUDDY available from https://mcebuddy2x.codeplex.com to edit out commercials, and save
them. Then you can put them in your Plex
directory. Did I forget to mention that
there is a Tablo Plex Channel? You would
need a Plex Media Server running on your local computer, available from
A
SurLaTablo.py by cjcox
Python program to query and convert Tablo
recordings
http://endlessnow.com/ten/SurLaTablo
B
TabloExporter by Jestep
Export Tablo files to MP4 files
http://jettsoft.com/products.html
C Tablo Ripper by CycleJ
FFMPEG is
needed for some of these