I bought into Tablo on the legacy models and was pretty happy overall. When one of them started acting funky, I bought a gen4. Wow, what a mistake. After about 11 months, it failed, and I lost all my recordings. Tablo sent me a new gen4, but I wasn’t going down that road again.
I had a Plex pass, so I bought a HDHR (Flex, 4 tuner). Together, they provided a nice interface with my old windows laptop AND recorded in .ts format (playable by VLC). BUT… the Plex software is kinda buggy, not nearly as bad as gen4, but not good either.
I found the Channels DVR software. Yeah, it costs 80 dollars a year, but wow, what a difference! Nice interface, no bugs, AND records in .mpg format. They don’t have an app for Roku unfortunately.
Overall, it’s like night and day. Any questions, fire away, I’m posting this because there have been a lot of helpful people over the years and I would like to return the favor if anyone is interested.
The little bit that I have looked into Channel DVR suggests that this is not really a consumer device, but more something for a techno-geek. I have said before that Tablo is not as ‘plug & play’ as their marketing suggests, but it is not too terrible if you are at least a little tech-savvy.
What was your setup experience like? Do you just plug your antenna into it, and connect it to an android-based streaming device?
Found this interesting. Granted, I’m able to use the Gen 4 software on a legacy Tablo (part of the beta), but it’s been quite stable overall even during the beta period.
I have an “old” 2 tuner Hauppauge USB tuner that I’ve tried a couple of times with Plex DVR and it’s just not near as stable and reliable.
I’ve had zero issues with my old 2 tuner Hauppauge and Plex. I guess I would be interested in what all these unnamed issues are (?). My ongoing monthly cost for a full featured media server plus DVR, $0. I have a couple of QuadHDs and plan at some point to replace that 2 tuner with one of them. But in my lab, using Plex, I was able to use both for a total of 8 tuners on one DVR.
Regarding the Channels DVR, I’d be interested in setting this up. Are there OTA tuners/sources other than HDHR that work with it? What are its requirements for an OTA tuner? These are all the sources I see…no other tuners work?
Honestly, part of it is just usage case, I really need more than 2 tuners and don’t to by another tuner right now (reason I’ve got a 4 tuner Tablo and had a 4 tuner TiVo).
I suppose another other part of it is what you use to host your Plex server. By your mention of QuadHD I assume you are using a NUC or at least a PC of some type as your Plex server since that’s a PCIe card? In my case the times I’ve tested using it I’ve used my OG Shield TV to run Plex server.
And lastly, I think part of it may be seemingly decreased signal quality with the Hauppauge USB tuner. I know nothing about the specs but I’m on the edge of being able to receive a couple of channels and the Tablo seems to pull them in a bit better than the Hauppauge.
P.S. Last time I tried it a few months ago, Plex DVR just didn’t seem to be as refined/stable as it should be by now.
Again, I have zero issues. Commercial removal and/or skip works. Integrates directly with all your existing media. Has features like time before and time after (to set to whatever value you want… great for live sports). I have an OG Tablo, it beats the pants off of it. Also, without pairing, you can view from anywhere. Since it simply dumps the files straight into your storage folders, zero issues with backups or transferring of files. I only see “more features” than the alternatives mentioned.
I just ordered a 4 tuner refurb. Question for you, I noticed Tablo does not have manual recordings. I was looking at HDHR and it appears that Emby, Channels & HDHR DVRs also do not have manual recordings (except with command line entries). If I am correct about that, it kind of leaves TiVo and Zapperbox that I can find. Being a TiVo user, I’m looking for an OTA replacement in the event they close down and I just assumed manual recordings would be part of any DVR. (Although, thinking on it, I remember Amazon’s Recast was missing that too.) Is it true the HDHR is not able to schedule manual recordings at the push of a button?
4th gen 4 tuner? I can’t speak to that as I have a legacy Tablo 4 tuner.
I think I’ve asked you before, but refresh me, what is your Plex configuration as far as server?
I messed up who I was replying to. I was asking @cjcox if the HDHR could do manual recordings.
I’m not using an HDHR, I’m using an Hauppauge PCIe internal 2-tuner card with Plex DVR.
What is manual recording?
On Gen4 if you want to record a show, just click on it in the guide and set up recording.
Manually scheduling a recording is when you set up the recording manually, selecting the time, channel, etc., without having to go through the Guide or Live Grid. You basically just select the start and end times and channel. The Gen4 doesn’t have this but it’s an often requested feature.
I have a Legacy Tablo 4-Tuner that is my primary DVR, a Legacy Tablo 4-Tuner in the Beta program testing the Gen4 apps, and a Plex media server running on a mini-tower PC using a WinTV-quadHD 4 tuner PCIe card that I occasionally use, especially for live sports. I could record 12 separate programs concurrently but I would never have that need. In fact, I also have a WinTV-HVR-950Q USB (single tuner?) that is not currently in use but if I did I could record 4 more programs as long as they share the same primary channel, e.g. I could record 11-1, 11-2, 11-3, and 11-4 using one tuner. Do I need all this? No, I could just get by with my Legacy Tablo and the Plex server. Like @cjcox , I find the Plex works great and the commercial skip is as good as what is available on the Legacy Tablo. Plex could easily be my main DVR and if something prevented my Legacy Tablo from working so well I would switch in a heartbeat. What keeps me in the Tablo universe is that the Legacy Tablo is just a bit more user friendly and I don’t want to switch things up for my wife. That said, the user-friendliness of the Legacy Tablo is only marginally better than Plex and to be honest, in my opinion, the user friendliness of the Plex is far superior to the Gen4 world. I have lifetime subscriptions for both Plex and Legacy Tablo so my monthly expense is $0.
So maual recording is like we did in the 1980’s, for those who figured out how to set the clock on their DVR.
I too an grandfathered into “original Tablo” policies. You just have to remember that even later in the OG realm, Tablo’s policies changed to create a “forever charge” for new users. That is, even the old company (which is dead) started doing bad things to the consumer. I went from “great product, great company”, to “I can no longer recommend”, to “what the heck!”
Don’t you mean, VCR? 
Yes, it WOULD be like that if it were an option. The Gen4 Tablo doesn’t offer it though.
And that’s exactly why I’m not doing anything regarding ATSC 3.0 right now.
If Tablo decides to change their policies and not honor a lifetime subscription if they end up marketing a ATSC 3.0 device, I’ll then look at other solutions.
Here are a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head. Let’s assume a particular channel is not getting any guide data or it has the incorrect data, this would require a manual recording. Or, there is special programming that is interrupting regular programming and it lasts two or more hours. Yes, you could select to record every episode in that time block, but it is easier to set a time. Another example is, I personally use it to set a recording for 12 hours recording of a music channel. I record the audio and make mp3s out of it.
ETA: I also noticed the Zapperbox (like TiVo) can repeat manual recordings, by the day or the week. This is helpful for programs like news, that repeat all day in the guide. And you might just want an hour every day.