I found a way to sort of do a manual recording. This is a true example. With the pending snow storm in my area, our local news has a weather newscast on Sunday at 11:00AM for my local Fox 25.1 in Boston. I select that day and time wich is scheduled for some other 1/2 hour program. Then, I extended the end time by the maximum 3 hours, giving me a 3.5 hour manual recording.
ETA: Funny thing is, I’m having a hard time making it stick with either Roku or my Android Cell Phone. It clears when I exit the app. I think it is now sticking in place using an android dongle.
Time will tell.
It was really pretty easy to do. I installed Channels DVR software on my laptop. I’m using a HDHR tuner and it picked it up right away. So you have the expense of an antenna, a tuner (HDHR), and a laptop. Channels really is for the consumer. Once set up, I found it easier to use than the gen4. Not as simple as the legacy Tablo, but that’s what you get with ‘bells and whistles’.
Well, when using Plex as a DVR, I would get random crashes. Plex would refuse to delete some shows. It wouldn’t load sometimes and required me to shut it down and restart. I didn’t see any of that with Channels.
I admit my setup required a bit of work but I use my Legacy Tablo to record shows that auto import into Plex. Plex handles all of the recording and scheduling tasks. Then Plex can handle commercial detection, intro skip, credit skip, thumbnails, and anything else Plex does. I have a network Tuner that works fine with Plex and doesn’t have issues using the Plex DVR option. I most stopped using it because my Tablo is 4 Tuner.
How my setup works.
Tablo records shows
Sonarr is my front end
A script checks to see what shows Sonarr is monitoring.
If Sonarr is monitoring a show it gets moved to Plex.
Plex does all the things like intro skip commercial skip and more.
Sonarr is often associated with “Sailing the high seas” but it doesn’t care where the content comes from. It’s really good at renaming and managing TV shows so they are in Plex folder format. I decided to use it for managing my Tablo content. No reason to recreate the wheel with such an awesome tool out there already. There is a version(Radarr) for movies as well.
If I get the time I really should update the script so it schedules Tablo recordings as well. That would be awesome to have a single interface that adds recordings to my Tablo recording schedule as soon as they are put on the TV schedule.
EDIT: Seems actually scheduling them might not be possible but I can list the upcoming shows that match and have them automatically import after they finish recording.
