Nice to hear everything is working well. Welcome to the group.
Not far from me. Iām in Austin, and my parents and sister live in Universal City, TX.
I use a Winegard FL5500A to get my statiibs and can get a couple of stations from Killen.
Do you get San Antonio or Austin stations or something else.
We get Dallas/Fort Worth stations, we are just too far for San Antonio or Austin. My Tablo scan shows all green, but sometimes when I tune to some channels they are so pixelated we canāt watch, and other stations just say weak signal. I did find in these forums that a 4G LTE filter may really help, so I have ordered one, and am praying that it works. Otherwise, I donāt know what I am going to do for the local channels.
Hows you channel 6 reception? and the rest of the channels?
HI All:
Iām a newbie - Iāve been a Tivo user for the past year but I wanted the live TV feature of Tablo without needing to use TivoMinis in the house. So far Iām happy with Tablo - but I need to learn more about it. Iāve read some posts about scripts to add - is that on the Tivo box itself or on the Amazon/Roku/or apple app? Basically - I want some of the functions I had with Tivo that seem to be missing (like limiting the number of episodes to keep).
I am somewhat computer savvy - but I am absolutely new to Tablo.
Hopefully I wonāt be going back to Tivo!
This is my screen name on most, if not all, of my online communities Iām a part of. Itās just my first 2 initials and my last name and in forums like this people tend to just refer to me as VEQ or just Q
Iām in Houston, more specifically the Spring/Klein portion of North Houston. I bought my Tablo 4 about a year ago with the intention of cutting the cord and moving to OTA for broadcast and an OTT service like PSVue for my āCableā service. That didnāt quite work out as my service provider was able to sucker me into renewing for a year by offering me a sizable discount on my services that was going to actually be cheaper per month to stick with the cable and internet bundle I had than to cancel and pay for all the OTT services I was going to need in order to still get everything I wanted.
For me cord cutting isnāt because I donāt watch my over bloated cable package. Quite the opposite, it was about finding the best possible price for everything I needed and somehow the company was able to deliver that. It helped the cable companyās cause that: 1. My apartment is only wired for their particular internet service; 2. The max internet speed they offered me at the time was a little too slow to get the most out of a Tablo; 3. Iām far enough away from broadcast towers (with 2 of the major 4 networks broadcasting on VHF) that my choices were to pony up for a large, expensive antenna, or press my luck with a cheaper antenna that claims to have a long enough range. I kept the cable bundle and basically forgot I even bought a Tablo for the year. $300 bucks well spent right?
Now a year later, the special discount they gave me is about to expire and unlike last year, Iām better armed to cut the cord entirely.
- Iām in the same apartment, but they upgraded the lines so while Iām still limited to 1 ISP, itās now doubled in speed and that combined with updates to the Tablo in the last year have really smoothed itās performance out nicely.
- I was able to DIY a custom built bowtie antenna out of sheet metal and I found a sweet spot in my apartment where every network I need, even the VHF broadcasted stations, come in beautifully.
- My viewing habits have changed where I donāt feel the need to keep the cable like I did a year ago. Iām also not in a rush to go out and subscribe to a PSVue or Sling type service immediately. The ultimate goal last year was to save as much money while still getting to keep my services and channels. Today the goal is to keep as much money in my pocket regardless of losing some services.
So thatās my story. As of this posting I still havenāt called to get the cable portion of my services cut, but I have been back using the Tablo for a good month now and aside from 1 little issue (that Iāll post about in the relevant thread later) that just popped up, I feel good about it.
I just purchased a TabloTV Duo after 3 years with Simple.tv. I have been happy with Simple.tv ever since Aereo was shut down in 2014 and was saddened to learn that Simple.tv is shutting down this week. (Hopefully this is not a trend.) Although Iāve only had the Tablo for a day, I can already see that itās going to work out very nicely. Same basic concept with a few nice enhancements. Fortunately I figured out how to save all of the recordings on my Simple.tv hard disk, so I can now reformat it and use it with my new Tablo. Iām just learning the new unit, so Iāll probably be stopping by here for some tips and tricks.
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Here is an update from two years later:
Still use the Tablo and love it (although I still hate the device pairing requirement and I wonāt recommend a Tablo to any other person until they fix this). Other than this issue, the Tablo has been bullet-proof.
Still use Comcast DSL. We have had to āre-upā twice now, but the monthly cost with all taxes included is just $37/month.
We added a couple Nexus players to the mix, you can never have too many streaming boxes!
We moved to PS Vue about 18 months ago because they had better sports channels in our area. Cost is currently $35/month, but will rise to $45/month in the near future. We will probably stick with PS Vue for now unless someone else can provide a more compelling option.
Couldnāt be happier with our cable cutting solution. Comcast can kiss my *ss . . .
I remember back that farā¦ The FF Preview, and the live TV grid both came out just after I bought my Tablo. Been a happy user for about 2 1/2 years now.
Hello all! My name is Chris and I live in NW Ohio, about halfway between Toledo and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Iāve just started my cord cutting journey. In fact, I still havenāt cancelled DirecTV because I need to improve my antenna signal strength. First, what I love about Tablo: the interface! I love the grid of shows for what is coming up the next 2 weeks! Iāve not seen that on any sort of cable/satellite system and it seems like a great blend of traditional guide and Netflix type streaming service menus! Obviously, the fact that I need no additional boxes to be able to watch anywhere in the house is awesome too! What I donāt like: the delay when changing live TV channels. I get that there is a process where it begins recording and then creating a buffer, but I donāt understand how the buffer takes that long when I can start a show on Netflix or Prime and have no wait and no buffering issues while streaming a higher bitrate. But, I have noticed that it is fantastic for watching recorded programs.
I am using the Marathon antenna from FreeSignalTV, and have to say that Iām less than impressed at this point. Based on reviews and company claims, I believed that I would be able to aim it toward Toledo and pick up Fort Wayne from the back, and Iāve not had luck with that yet. There are a couple more things Iām going to try before giving up and going with a different antenna though. Itās mounted on my chimney, nearly 25 feet off the ground, pointed toward the Fort Wayne towers around 44 miles away and Iām not getting a solid green on all the networks yet. Iād love to hear about success stories from any of you and how you made things work to pick up distant signals.
Short answer is that OTA broadcasts use MPEG-2, which is not suitable for streaming to most clients. So the Tablo unit has to transcode to a different format before it can stream. It does this while recording, so playing back pre-recorded content is fine. For live TV, it has to set up the transcode and buffer the content each time you change channels.
Hello Tablo community,
I just recently purchased a refurb 2 tuner Tablo and am testing it out. In full disclosure I have been a long time TIVO user and currently have a TIVO OTA unit plus a MINI. I wanted to compare how TABLO & TIVO stack up aginst each other. SO far I think its pretty close. Tablo has one big advantage in that it works with just about any other streaming device like FireTv & RoKu. TIVO locks you into there own little world so for that reason I am most interested in the TABLO. On the other hand TIVO is a little faster to load a live channel for instant viewing or channel flipping. I understand the reason why because Tablo is ranscoding to a smaller different file type so it can be played on more remote devices. As to picture quality Its really hard to tell the difference to my old eye but I think TIVO is just slightly better because it is basically the native mpeg2 file type. TIVO does offer Dolby 5.1 audio but honestly for over the air programming its not that big a deal to me but I do hope someday Tablo figures out how to do it too.
All in all I like both setups and will be using them both at times. In the long run I believe Tablo will be more useful because it runs on My FireTv & Roku streamers and I do not like switching back and forth from TV inputs all the time.
I look forward to having the option of either device and will be following up here watching and learning about things Tablo can do and new features.
Dave
All in all I think its more of a personal
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Heyā¦ new to this forum - signed up this weekend to see what was disclosed about common problems with the device.
We ācut the cordā last month when Brighthouse (now Spectrum, aka Time-Warner) decided the rates we had paid for the last 5 years where somehow actually a limited time āpromotionā. The last bit of the solution was how to DVR the OTA content and Tablo is exactly what I wanted. I replaced an aging Motorola device we had used in an RV.
Iām a software support engineer at a multinational telecom equipment provider. I work from a home office in Florida.
Hello Tablo community. I was a continuous DirecTV customer since 1997, and was very happy with their offering and their technology. After reviewing the family budget in light of college tuition and retirement, that $130/month ($1500/year) spend on DirecTV no longer fit our spending values. I tried to get DirecTV to remove 95% of the channels and reduce the cost by 95%, but no dice. After a deep review of our total TV/Internet spend, we were surprised to find we were spending approx $210/month all in. So last December we cut the cord, and moved to Centurylink 80MBit DSL ($55/month), the Tablo Guide ($5/month) and kept Netflix streaming (now $11/month). Our total spend is now just over $70/month, cutting our total spend by 2/3rds, saving us ~$1700/year. I did spend ~$800 on my hardwareā¦4 channel Tablo, hard drive, 3 Rokus, 1GB Network switch, powered exterior omni Antenna, new DSL modem, power strip, patch cables etcā¦ My cord-cutting investment will pay for itself in about 6 months, and the savings will add up forever thereafter.
Note: My house was already wired with Cat5 (with RJ45 jacks) and RG6 coax throughout. I put a 1GBit switch in my phone closet and hard-wired my DSL Modem/WiFi router, Tablo and the Rokus into the switch using simple RJ45 patch cables into my patch panel. I donāt have any issues with bufferingā¦even at 1080 and four devices at onceā¦this system works wonderfully. My house also came with a powered RF splitter in the phone closet, so every TV in the house also has an OTA signal, good for surfing and as a backup in case the Tablo has issues. I also connected my two stereo audio receivers to the OTA antenna giving me superior FM reception. It all feels so high tech and retro at the same time! So far I am very impressed with the Tablo, warts and all.
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I donāt know you, but I hate you. 
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I hear ya. My only saving grace is our house is small enough that most of the hardware in the house is on one side or the other of the living room (besides the second TV in our bedroom), so I just drilled two small holes on either side of the living room and ran Cat5 under the house in the crawl space.
When we were looking at the house to purchase it, the greatest impact was stepping into the phone closet to find a patch panel with all of this stuff terminated there. Somebody was thinking ahead. I thought to myself, āIf I were to build a house today, this is exactly what I would do.ā It was love at first sight! I canāt take any credit for that, but boy did it make my cord-cutting job easy!
I am a retired broadcast engineer. My primary responsibility was to maintain 30,000 Watt television transmitters but along the way I also repaired test equipment, audio & video terminal equipment, and various other pieces of electronics gear. During the last eleven years in that position, I spent some of my time investigating reception problems at the public schools. Most of it was trivial but not all.
Just a little before I retired, a friend and I began working the local NFL games as game day frequency coordinators. No pay - great seats - 2 meals - and as NFL officials we could go anywhere in the stadium. But putting 100 to 150 transmitter-receiver pairs in a football stadium takes reception problems to a whole new level. We were both ready to give it up after 7 years!
By 1984 I had taught myself to program in machine language, assembly, and C. Some of which I used while at work. Immediately after I retired I spent 6 months writing software which I could use to analyze television transport streams which I would have previously saved to a file. I currently program in Objective C. (As a hobby and to satisfy my curiosity.)
I live 10 miles south of Cincinnati Ohio and about 57miles southwest of Dayton Ohio. The equipment is a Winegard model CH-8100 antenna with RG-11 coax and no preamp. I put up the system in 1980 and it still works very well. That system has been feeding a 4-way splitter for about the last 20 years. I have always received all the Cincinnati stations with no problems and all the Dayton stations except when storms were moving thru the area.
I cut the cord for the last time in 2003 after the local cable companyās annual rate increases for the last 5 years had totaled a 55% increase.
I acquired the Tablo Dual with 64 GByte about 2 months ago, so that I could time shift some programming and go to bed earlier. (Before midnight!) At the same time I purchased a Nighthawk AC-1750 router and I use that with ethernet cables to drive the Tablo Dual and a FireTV stick w/Ethernet Adaptor. Shortly afterwards, I purchased a WD Elements portable 4 TByte external drive. It all seems to play well together.
I was pleasantly surprised after the first scan when all the stations from both cities showed 5 green dots. They must have a low noise preamp in the front end or my 2008 Toshiba set has a poor front end. (I doubt the latter.) I have not seen a loss of signal and only very seldom see a little ātilingā on a Dayton station. It has only been 2 months but we have had a lot of rain locally during that time.
I have 43 program streams on my Live TV guide. (After excluding about 20) There are still a lot of duplicates but over the years I have found those to be useful. (From time to time)
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I learned āobject orientedā programming in college using Brad Coxās book. Of course, I was programming in C++ at the time (this is before Windows 3.1 folks, around 1986-87).
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I flirted with Java in the 1990s but I compiled it, thus violating the intent of the language! :^)
In 2002 I wrote a program in C++ that benefitted from using objects. But I found C++ to be overly complicated for what I was writing. And the compiler seemed to be very rigid.
In 2010 I bought my first Mac and proceeded to learn Objective C. I could write in C and add the Objective C as needed. (No special declarations or other considerations.)
At heart I am still a C programmer.
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