Web site says I should be able to get 50 hours of recording using the onboard storage. I have 27 hours of OTA video. Tablo > Settings > Internal Flash(128 GB) says I have 95.7 GB used with 19.9 GB available. Or 17% available.
According to Tablo, for onboard storage, average Gigabytes/Hour (OTA) is 1.35 GB/ hour. So 27 X 1.67 = 36.45 GB. So the amount used should 36.45 instead of 95.7.
That would indicate that over twice the amount of storage is being used for OTA recordings. What is eating up the storage?
A single 1 hour recording done at 8:00 PM reduced available storage from 26% to 24%. So 2% storage usage or 2.31 GB per hour (115.5 X 2%). So 27 X 2.31 = 62.37 GB. That is still less that the 95.7GB being reported. What is eating up the storage?
Two 1 hour recordings, one started at 10:00 PM and one started at 10:01 PM, reduced available storage from 24% to 17%. That is a 7% reduction. Or 3.5% storage usage per 1 hour.
Why more storage when recording 2 OTA programs at a time, versus 1 at a time?
I did open a ticket but Tablo closed it after pointing me to the docs. Well I’m using your docs and the numbers do not seem to add up.
Is this a software problem, onboard storage failure, MPEG4 archiving problem, bad docs, or I do not understand.
If I recall correctly, they say it is up to 50 hours. I think that is assuming all lower resolution broadcast, like re-runs of Gilligan’s Island on some little independent channel. Modern, HiDef broadcast require a lot more space.
An external drive make a big difference. I have an inexpensive 2TB, but it will accept up to 8TB.
Yes, it should be sold with enough storage, and they should be clearer about how quickly it eats it up. However, with the external drive, I am really pretty happy with mine.
I have a legacy 128gb unit and I use it’s internal storage. It records in H.264 and I have mine set to record at 720p. So for an actual 720p OTA station that is around 2.2 GB per hour. So you will find that for the same show record on both units the gen 4 size is 50% larger. So is the gen 4 really archiving?
Is the Gen 4 really archiving? That’s a good question. What happens if the MEPG4 transcoding aborts for some reason. The tablo can only transcode a total of 8 hours of video within a 24-hour timeframe. Is the software smart enough to queue multiple video transcoding. The Library says I have 0 failed recordings. There is no way for the user to look at the structure of the onboard storage.
Do you really need to know the internal structure. Tablo says it records OTA to internal storage as MPEG2 and then archives it to H.264. If you know the space used at the start of the recording and the space used at the end of the recording shouldn’t the space used decrease after archiving. So a football game recording that is 3 hours and 30 minutes long should use less space after archiving.
Is the space statistic right after a recording for the MPEG2 file. Or is a guess at what the space used will be after transcoding. Transcoding/archive supposedly does not start till after the recording has ended. Seem transcoding is done as a background job. Transcoding take at least twice as long as the OTA runtime.
If there is a hardware or software malfunction, how is the user notified. It’s just a block box.
How is that possible since the tablo documentation says it takes 2 hours to transcode for every hour of recording. And if you have a 2 tuners like I do and record 2 football games at the same time there are no spare tuners available to do real time transcoding.
They have to be doing the transcoding as a “background job”. The “background job” uses the just completed MPEG2 file as input to the transcoding job and outputs a new file that is encoded as MPEG4. Upon successful completion, the MPEG2 is deleted and the just transcoded file take it’s place. No tuner is need for the transcoding. It’s read a file, output a file.
So you agree with me. If, on a 2 tuner gen 4, you record 2 3 1/2 shows that start and end at the same time then the internal storage space used when the recordings end should decrease after compression to h.264.
As far as I can tell, Tablo does not report to the user when an MPEG4 archive begins or ends. Or if the transcoding was successful or not. Right after a recording is ended, I would expect to see a reduction in available onboard storage to reflect the size of the MPEG transport stream. After the transcoding is completed, I would expect a slight increase in available onboard storage because the transcoding from MPEG2 to MPEG2 should result in a smaller file size. I would expect about a 40% - 50% reduction if file size.
I have been recording OTA channels for 6 weeks and only observed remaining % decrease right after the recording ended. I have never seen that figure randomly increase. I have only seen increases, immediately, after I delete a recording.
It would be nice if someone from Tablo would give a more in-depth explanation of what is going on.
Recording activity for Thursday night. At 8:00pm, remaining space at 17%, At 8:31 PM, a 30 minute recording was performed. Upon completion, remaining space has decreased to 15%. So 2% for a 30 minute recording!!!. At 10:00 PM, a 1 hour recording. At 11:30 PM, the remaining space had decreased to 12%. So 3% for a 1 hour recording. This morning, Friday, remaining space was still 12%.
Tablo activity for Friday night. Started the night with free space of 12%. Watched 4 recorded 1 hour episodes and deleted each episode after watching. Also recorded a 1 hour program at 10:00 PM. Before close out the App for the night, free space was 20%. Today, Saturday, free space is 22%. Looks like we picked up 2% overnight. Seems a bit odd but I’ll take it.
. My cat is much better looking than I am!
