I would really like to see support for storing and playing the native unmolested ATSC MPEG2 transport streams that are sent by the OTA broadcast. This would present a much higher quality picture than the transcoded/compressed streams that are used currently, and could alleviate many problems and product gaps seen currently including motion blur, compression artifacts, lip sync, and Dolby 5.1 AC3.
There have been arguments against this in the past that have even been part of Tablo’s product goals, but they are just not valid anymore. Big storage is cheap. Networks are fast- 1GbE and 802.11ac are commonplace. Most newer Android devices and OS versions support MPEG2 decoding either in hardware or software, and have sufficient horsepower to do it with ease.
C’mon Tablo, lets stop trashing that beautiful OTA picture and sound and start using it in its full glory. There are upstart DVR’s coming to market that will use this, so let’s not fall further behind. We want to enjoy full quality HD AND the great Tablo interface!
Why not? It sounds like the Tablo saves incoming OTA data in the MPEG2 format and transcodes it when it is to be streamed. If the device requesting the stream can handle MPEG2, don’t transcode.
No it does not do that. The Tablo re-encodes the video on the fly (aka real-time) from MPEG-2 to h.264 video. The video stored on the USB HDD is h.264 video.
Maybe this will be a future feature of the Tablo 2nd generation, but with the current hardware and software implementation, I never see them recording the native MPEG2 video. But I do not work for Tablo, so I am speculating. But there are a ton of reasons why it doesn’t make sense.