I realized recently that my Tablo (1st gen, I think) is now 13 years old and still going strong. I got worried that some new features in my.tablotv.com might mean that it wouldn’t work with my old device. So, I finally got around to making my own as a backup.
The code is available on GitHub and I’ve created a 1.0 Beta release so that other people can test it. Please feel free to try it out: Releases · Epchk/Tablo_Lite · GitHub
I’ve tested it in Edge, Firefox, and Safari on an iPad. It must be run from a computer that is on the same network as the TabloTV device. It is meant to be served from a static web server.
You can run it from a local file with the file:/// browser method but the initial setup page won’t change after you enter the IP Address of the TabloTV device because it can’t save the value in a cookie. You can, however, click the home icon on the left to proceed.
Limitation
I, intentionally, do not make use of the guide data from the tablotv device. This was a design choice so that (hopefully) Tablo Lite will still be usable in the event that my device no longer receives even the free guide data.
@eek, thanks for this. I have it running on my Synology NAS’s web server and everything works except watching live or recorded shows. The Watch page shows the correct URL, which I can copy and paste into VLC player and it plays fine, but the player on the Watch page never plays the video. It seems like it’s just trying to download the whole file (I see hard drive activity while the video is trying to load). I have an HDMI TV attached Tablo so that may be the problem. I doesn’t transcode the video to h264 but just serves the raw mpegts video in hls chunks. Do you think this is a limitation of the hls.js player?
I picked hls.js specifically because it’s supposed to support the raw mpegts encoding. My ancient 2-tuner (doesn’t have any internal storage) doesn’t transcode either and is definitely sending the raw mpegts files.
I run it from an Apache web server that only serves static pages. I expect your Synology NAS should be about the same (maybe better).
I just double checked on my iPad (iPadOS 17.6.1). The live stream doesn’t auto-play but pressing the play button on the player interface starts it once the stream starts loading. Same for a recording (I had to push the play icon on the video player in the browser).
I think all the original Tablos (except the HDMI TV Tablos) transcode the video to h264. I think this is why the HDMI Tablos don’t have a Windows Store app and the my.tablo.com site doesn’t work with them. It’s the raw MPEG-2 video in ATSC 1.0 that the HDMI Tablos stream that can’t be decoded by browsers. I think I may be stuck just copying and pasting the url displayed on the Watch page into VLC.
How do you use it? I clicked on the website file and put in my ip address and left the url blank. then i clicked on active channels and it went to some canadian channel listing and don’t know where to click after that. thank you
Sorry. That’s kind of experimental. On the setup page (the one that should have showed up first and had you enter the IP address of your Tablo also asks for a URL for something to show TV listings. The default is one that showed up on Google when I did a search.
If you need to get back to that setup page you can delete the cookies for the page or go to #setup to see it again and make updates.
So what I did was first try changing from hls.js to video.js but kept getting many errors so that was a bust. I ended up just removing the player on the Watch page and just have it display the bare url at the top. I then copy and paste this into VLC on my PC or iPad. Kind of low tech but it works.
Thanks again for creating this. I can now watch my HDMI Tablo on my PC or iPad.