Since not many people take the time to give feedback and only post when they have a problem or complaint I thought I’d start a positive feedback thread.
For me this device has been a breath of fresh air. I’ve been using a MythTV setup for the last 4-5 years, with heavy usage about 3 years ago when we cut the cord. Recently the drive in my linux machine decided it had enough, and the machine pretty much died. I took the opportunity to check out what was on the market and except for a couple of tired old products there wasn’t much to be found. Then I came across Tablo. Bought one and waited for it to arrive eagerly.
First impressions: OH MY GOD where have you been the last three years. The interface is fresh, playback through Roku and Plex are quite nice. Sure there are a couple of features I’d like, but this is by far the best DVR experience for OTA i’ve tried yet.
Great job Tablo, And who knew, you are headquartered about 15 minutes from me, maybe I’ll visit with a round of coffees for the team.
While we aren't really set up for having guests randomly stop by, we won't turn down a 'thank you' box of donuts. :D
Well then time to get your basement cleaned up a bit, eh? Just kidding! Here are some of my favorite things:
Tablo uses an external drive chosen by the owner, not some pre-determined drive or size someone else decided I’d be better off with. If said drive fails, I replace it and move on, yeah, I’ve lost my recordings but hey, I’ve not lost the Tablo and I can go to Walmart 24/7 and get another drive! Kudos on letting me choose the drive and replace it if needed. 4 tuners, Really? That was my first thought - REALLY? FOUR? WOW, that’s for me. No debate there, I glanced at the 2 tuner and naw, if I do go Tablo it’s a quad for sure. I don’t have to move it to each TV in case we go to another room? Say we want to make some holiday goodies in the kitchen and want to watch something we recorded… I don’t have to lug the DVD recorder or some other device around and cable things up, spending 20 minutes just to be able to play to a different TV. Better yet my wife could be in her quilting rooms watching her westerns and I could be in the front room with some sci-fi stuff blasting out on the main TV. No messy cables. Choice of Ethernet 100Mbps or Wi-Fi, easily changed by plugging or unplugging the cable and hitting the blue button quickly. It’s small and light and doesn’t suck a lot of wattage. We’re trying to cut electric use where we can, LED lighting, heat pump, etc. and this fits our plans energy-wise. This isn’t unique - but the 1-click recording is cool if you have the program guide. Thanks to owners/users and others, we can export or pull off content to other devices, like my PC, for later saving to some other device (Python scripts thanks to “3rd parties”)
A few bugs and kinks here and there, but not enough to make me send this back and take advantage of the Amazon return policy, I’ve decided. My personal priorities would be to get it integrated into Chromecast better/sooner, and get FF working on our Android phones, make playback so simple that my wife could do it. She’s still on me about showing her how to play things back - and I’m still struggling with that since it’s not easy on the phone with the web app and Chromecast. But I have hope. This device and company must survive. There’s nothing else out there like it, requires no subscription (if you are ok with the manual recordings sans-guide
