Would you consider adding an advanced option to define the local IP of the Tablo. For reasons I don’t understand the app can never find my Tablo anymore. I always have to tap scan twice and wait for it to fail so I can manually connect.
Thanks for the great app!
EDIT: Perhaps a comma separated list for those with two Talblos although that wouldn’t affect me.
Hi again!
Gosh, that’s gotta be irritating, sorry. Has anything changed with your network setup recently? Ota2go uses an initial UDP local broadcast packet to find your tablo(s) so if it used to work, something now is getting in the way.
Can u PM me the IPs of your phone and Tablo and a high level description of your network and router setup?
Thx!
It would appear the issue is only on my phone. After your response I used the app on my tablet and it seems to see the Tablo every time. So probably not a network issue. It figures… Lenovo introduced a lot of issues with their last update. I should probably wipe my phone and see if a reset helps with tablo2go and many other apps that have been quirky. Thanks for you assistance and a great app. Maybe a simple clear cache would help but it’s probably time for something more drastic.
Myself personally I’ve just never understood the purpose of these To Go Apps. If I’m camping I wouldn’t want to watch TV, if I’m on a plane I listen to music. If I’m away from the house I just VPN in and everything just works from normal apps as if I’m home. On an airplane is about the only place I can see using such an app personally, but then again not really.
So in what situation do people use these To Go apps?
Obviously you don’t do long international trips. Having access to recorded content on a 10-14 hour flight is really nice. And when we get where we’re going, we generally don’t have good enough Internet access for remote streaming.
Now, I don’t actually use this app. I convert recorded content to Plex and download into the Plex app. I also download Netflix and Prime Video content before a trip as well. But it’s the same end result.
Yah, I don’t and I’m always up front where entertainment in many forms is provided, well on the right airline at least. I can see where long international flights would be a good place for that. I think my wife would benefit more, I’m a 1-2 hour a night of TV person, she’s more of a 4-5 hour a night person. So long flights, I may have to keep that in mind.
I’m curious to know this too! I wrote it because at the time I took the train to work - about an hour’s trip total in a day, without WiFi, and it’s the only time I really had to watch programs of my choosing (KIDS 
), so that was a perfect use case for me. I also used to take the subway to work, which could be an hour underground with no WiFi OR cell signal. And bandwidth here in Canada is not cheap at all
There are other great rippers such as Tablo Ripper that have great integration with Plex, but I thought there might be space for the “Netflix Download Experience” in Android - just one click, no servers needed, i.e. my Mom could do it 
Don’t tell her I said that!
Cheers!
Ewww man, ok yes I get your point. I can listen to music for hours on end, but that would push my limits and I would be looking for other stuff to do.
There is only 1 Togo app. Indivuals put time into their work and shouldn’t be trivialized.
I use capto along with wrapto to move files to my media PC, because it’s intigrated into my house. I don’t like tablo UI or media player. I want a bit more control over my system. It provides me a bit of privacy as to some of my viewing routine\habits.
You know, like how some obsess about heat and voltage😑
This may be far more than you want to know, but you asked. Plus, I can copy and paste from this thread to other conversations if appropriate, now I’ll have my journey written down and all in once place. 
TL;DR: It offers a simple solution to a requirement I have for my situation.
For me in the end it was in the interest of simplifying things.
I started off my cord cutting journey with a goal of maintaining a single unified interface for everything as much as possible. Generally speaking that’s what I got from TiVo and it worked well as far as the FAF (Family Acceptance Factor). I say that’s what I got from TiVo because I did utilize tools to both “push” and “pull” content to/from our TiVo and as a result we used the TiVo interface for pretty much everything. This continued when we moved from using our TiVo with our cable to using it OTA (our first TiVo purchase was the original Roamio that supported both cable and OTA) in the interest of cutting costs and the realization that 90% of what we actually watched was network, Netflix or Amazon Prime.
With the kids getting older and having their own devices we started looking at a “whole home” solution and quickly determined the additional cost of TiVo Mini units (and back when this journey started you still had to pay a small service fee each month for each of them as well) was not something we were interested it.
So I started looking at other “whole home” solutions and as a result of that research narrowed things down to Plex, Tablo & HDHomeRun. Plex TV was still in the development/infancy stages and HDHomeRun was just starting their internal DVR focus so honestly Tablo was the most mature live/DVR solution that was available at the time and we could use our existing devices (Roku, Shield TV, etc.) and achieve the “whole home” goal with no other additional upfront cost than the Tablo itself and the hard drive for it I chose to buy new (although I could have just re-used an existing one).
Since I was looking for the unified interface and my research made me aware of utilities like TabloRipper (similar in ways to the kmttg software I used with the TiVo) I initially went the route of letting Tablo do the recording and using other various utilities to transfer the recording to the NAS, remove commercials, etc overnight via scheduled recordings. That allowed the TV and movie collections to exist in one unified interface.
However, because of some of the things @sctaylor mentioned about times of the day not having WiFi access and programs I watch that aren’t necessarily what I want my kids watching at their ages, I was using Plex Mobile Sync to get content onto my phone. Suffice it to say, when I was using it at least, it was very unreliable and also required setting up more “tasks” to get everything to magically work overnight.
Once the Tablo apps matured and especially when they implemented commercial skip, all of a sudden I could accomplish basically the same thing I was doing via TabloRipper and Plex without having to do all those other external processes overnight. Additionally, because of less and less time to “tinker” with the kids getting older and other commitments I was at that same time actually looking for ways to simply the whole setup. So we moved to using the Tablo apps as our primary playback UI instead of Plex, but I kept most of the processes running in order to still allow me a way to get content to my phone.
Enter ota2GO! The final piece I was looking for was announced by @sctaylor right as I was making those other decisions and looking for a solution to the final piece. I was a thorn in his side for a bit there in the early days of ota2GO but I do software testing and support for a living so it worked pretty well I think as far as giving him some good feedback and troubleshooting issues. Heck, it even supports playback of 5.1 recordings on my non-5.1 surround device.
Installed and trying to download 2 hour movie. The circle keeps going around. How long should it take?
I did the upgrade to pro version. I selected SD quality.
Do you have Time Saver or Space Saver as the selected Download Method? Not exactly apples to apples but on Time Saver a 1 hour TV show download takes 6-8 minutes for me. Does the percentage downloaded keep going up?
Just canceled download, turned phone off, turn back on. Will try again. I’ll try timesaver method this time.
The app did NOT pay attention to cancel download. It looks like it resumed. I want it to cancel.
Edit: my bad . I pressed SD instead of download and no video playback was selected.
Man is Time Saver mode fast. Awesome app.
Don’t know how I missed it in January but glad I found it today. Will search all me email for Tablo blog and make sure it is in Inbox.
Glad it ended up working properly! Generally when you hit download the little circle will spin for a moment only, and then you’ll get “…” for a while (maybe a minute sometimes?) while it analyzes the recording in prep for the download… and THEN it will start counting up the %.
As you may have gathered, TimeSaver is fast but copies a full size file to your device (many phones are limited in storage), and SpaceSaver transcodes a smaller file to your device but is SLOW by comparison. Personally I use TimeSaver mostly and just keep a handful of shows downloaded, as they fit on my phone.
Let me know if you see any strange behaviour of course - always open for suggestions and bug reports!
Cheers!
I got a huge SD card in the phone and tablet. I first tried it without looking at the settings. I changed them. I know if you do it while you’re sleeping that you don’t want the alarm.
suggest external batteries for your phone. Amazon sells various sizes by Anker. I have some and highly recommend them… Listening to music doesn’t use as much battery as watching videos with the screen on.
Haa funny, so you hide your ‘collection’
Not quite following but no, neither in Plex nor Tablo is anything hidden, I’m just saying I’m not going to watch certain TV shows on our main TV. They can see them in the Tablo recordings but honestly most of the their content viewing is streaming services, primarily Netflix and YouTube.
