Just got my Tablo 2-tuner recently in the hopes that I could use it as a bridge between my antenna and my tuner-less Vizio SmartCast TV, but sadly I’ve had nothing but frustration using it. I think it boils down to the fact that I live in a valley and have pretty sub-par signal from most stations, but I can’t seem to get the Chromecast functionality to work consistently.
The OTA channels in my area do this weird thing that when a bus or truck drives by, the signal will get interfered with. My old TV with a built-in tuner would show a scrambled/mangled signal for a split second, then happily carry on when the bus is gone a second later. However with my Tablo, I’ll tune into a station and it will initially cast fine to a Chromecast device. But when the Tablo loses signal for the split second, the stream doesn’t show the garbled signal; instead it pauses and looks like it’s buffering. Unfortunately it never stops buffering at this point, so I have to tune to a different channel to get it un-stuck. When I tune back to the original channel, the Tablo stream time-warps and reverts back to the time when I first tuned to the station. Tapping “Live” just goes right back to the start again. If I stop casting, sometimes the video stream on my phone will actually be live, but re-casting it to the Chromecast goes right back to the beginning again. Gah!
Along those lines, I’ve noticed that the time-bar when Chromecasting consistently shows 0:00 as the time, with no progress bar nor “live” button. Tapping the +30/-20 buttons just revert it right back to the beginning too.
Any ideas? I got it in the hopes that it would do OTA->Chromecast, but I’ve had nothing but headaches since setting it up
I live in a valley surrounded by trees. My reception is difficult but there are ways to surmount it. If one is below street level, passing vehicles will reflect the signal and cause multipath interference. One way to transcend this is to aim the antenna just above the horizon by tilting it 15 to 20 degrees upwards. Tilting an antenna is equivalent to giving it some height.
What type of antenna do you have? How far are you from the broadcast towers? Is your antenna on the roof, in the attic or in a room? Do you have an amplifier?
If you search on here you’ll find that although Chromecast is noted as supported it really doesn’t work well. I myself bought my Tablo in the hopes of using it in the exact same way you mentioned above. I have both a V1 and V2 Chromecast and regardless of unit it would just never work reliably. Basically it would run for a few mins and then buffer, run for a few mins and then buffer. It was very annoying and wouldn’t pass the wife test. After much headaches and getting told it was anything from my wifi router to the Chromecast units themselves I choose to abandon my Chromecast units in favor of a more simple path which was to just use the Tablo as an OTA DVR unit and use the fabulous SurLaTablo script to extract my recorded content to my Plex media server. From there I can access all my recordings without issue, over the same wifi and Chromecast units that everyone was saying where the issue. Personally I think that the Tablo Chromecast support is really just window dressing and not really fully baked yet. They are saying that they are going to revisit it sometime but right now the focus is on the Apple TV app. For live TV I simply connected my TVs to my antenna using a good powered splitter box and now I can channel surf Live TV with no delay or issues and record what I desire and watch what I desire when and where I desire. Plex also supports remote viewing of content if your a Plex Pass subscriber.
Just a quick question. How are you casting to the Vizio Smartcast TV? Did you install the Tablo android app on the android tablet that came with the TV?
I might mention here that the Vizio supports Google cast (which is software). Chromecast is a device sold by Google. People tend to use the term “ChromeCast” for 3rd party implementation of the Googlecast software.
You might want to look at the AVSforum (who have a large amount of info on casting using the new Vizio’s) in the P Series and M series Vizio’s.
I believe the issue is the ChromeCast interferring with the OTA antenna signal. For me that was problem / solution. When I remove power from ChromeCast problem goes away. Problem does not exist with my Roku, just the ChromeCast.
Try removing power to your ChromeCast. Hopefully it resolves your issue as well.
