New Tablo User - Not Impressed

I agree totally. I LOVE my Tablo. Once the channel loads, I have not had any buffering issues and I love the fact that I can playback on a Roku, FireTV and Nvidia Shield Tv. I also have a hdhomerun [had it prior to the Tablo] but I no longer use it for recording. I think the future is very bright with updates and maturity

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I also love my Tablo. I was already a cord cutter, but was missing DVR and went looking on Amazon. I like that it can play on lots of devices, including FireTV, Android phone, Roku. Also multiple people can be watching different shows at the same time as long as they have a device to watch on. Though I would prefer to watch on something that shows on a TV instead of the small screen of an Android phone. My Tablo seems MUCH improved since I got it, but I’m already running what most are waiting for. I surely hope it gets released this week.

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Thank to everybody for all the advice. My TV in my living room is a Sanyo (2009) 46" 1080p, the TV in my bedroom is a Dell (2006) 32" 720p, and my theater TV is a Sony (2012) 55" 1080p 3D Smart TV. I’ve always used a guide service to look up upcoming shows for my living room TV. Both my bedroom and theater TV are hooked to desktop HTPC’s and use Windows Media Center (WMC) for their guides. WMC is easy to hack because EPG files just get downloaded to a specific directory. From WMC’s interface you can only specify 1 region and 1 postal code, but it will read multiple EPG’s if there is more than one in the directory. My Sony TV also came with a guide provided by Rovi. It was very lacking though. It never had data for sub or out of my local area channels. Anyways, Rovi and Sony had a dispute over the software programing of the guide and it is now no longer available. The Tablo guide is fine. It just needs some polishing. I was only missing 2 channels from my lineup. I opened a support ticket so I’m going to wait and see how long it takes to get updated. I like the fact that they let you make those kinds of requests. You can’t do that with TiVo or Rovi.

I cut the cord a long time ago. I have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and an OTA antenna. I even had Sling TV for a few months but I found I wasn’t watching the channels they offered that much, their interface was horrible and many of the channels had blackout restrictions.

I did some 720 recording last night and I will try 1080 tonight. I’m going to continue playing around and see if my opinion improves.

If all your devices are hard wired use the 1080p recording quality. There is still video quality loss but minimal.

If your theater has an AVR with 5.1, sorry. Tablo can only do 2.0 (no Dolby Digital Surround Sound).

@Max Yep I have a Sony 7.1 AVR. Hopefully this is on the top of the list to fix.

@hellbound I’ve been waiting for 5.1 for 18 months now. It’s been on the “short term roadmap” , then just the “roadmap”, and lately it’s been a “low priority task”

So yes, they said they are able to do it, but since demand is so low, they have no intentions of doing it anytime in the near future.

I’ve been very vocal about DD5.1 in this thread, and you can see Tablo’s nonchalant response.

There is a long and contentious thread on that topic, but the short answer is that it is on Tablo’s to-do list, but it isn’t a top priority on that list.

Also, just FYI, Pro Logic II decoding does work with Tablo.
Here is what Tablo says about their audio capabilities:

I’ve only had the Tablo for a day and a half now. I only recorded one show in 720 last night but have not tried to play it yet. My Windows 8.1 HTPC is capable of upconverting to 7.1 audio over HDMI. If I set the sound card to 2-channel audio it will just pass through the audio stream to my receiver. My receiver can do the same upconvert. I will set my PC to pass through and my AVR to auto and see what happens.

I think if you set your AVR to auto, you’ll just get stereo. You’ll probably need to select PLII as your audio output on the AVR.

Depends on the AVR. Pretty sure mine is set to auto, and it does DTS (DTS-HD? DTS-MA?) when I play bluray, DD when I watched cable/DVDs, and DPLII on Tablo now.

I think you’re thinking of “Pure” or whatever the term is for a particular AVR manufacturer. Then it’ll only play what it gets. So for Tablo it’d be stereo, but for DD it’d be surround.

Yes, it will depend on the AVR. Mine (Denon) will auto switch to DTS or DD5.1 when the source provides appropriate signal, but will default to whatever setting I manually selected when not Dolby, which in my case could be stereo or PLII, etc. So I initially had stereo from my Tablo, until I selected PLII as the output I wanted - but the AVR is set for auto-switching, not Pure or Direct.

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When my PC is set to pass through I keep my AVR set to PLIIx.

  • PLIIx = 7.1
  • PLII = 5.1

The biggest issue is when channels that broadcast in 2 channel stereo and 480 the audio is really bad and often is much louder. You have to constantly reach for the volume control. I don’t do “Night Mode” to fix this because of how the AVR tunes the audio. Lately I have been having the PC upconvert everything to 7.1. That makes everything nice and uniform on my AVR.

@hellbound Hey there - sorry for the late note on this. If you’re still having issues, please feel free to send us a note directly ` if you haven’t already. We’re happy to work with you on this.

I agree with the original poster! I wanted the Tablo to be able to get rid of high provider bills. My wife watches much more TV than me and she is not going to use one device to look up TV listings while watching our HDTV. The fact that the show you’re watching stops playing while looking at the guide is a killer. I’ll be sending it back unless someone from Tablo can tell me that that will be fixed soon!

Return it.

The channel is still actively being tuned while you are looking at the guide. If you do happen to miss something while looking at the guide, you can just hit rewind and see what you missed.

This isn’t something that can be “fixed”. It is an integral part of how the Tablo works.

It’s a limitation of the Tablo. It’s a great time-shifting dvr. It sucks for live-tv/channel surfing.

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