Hmm. I hard-wired everything to a separate GigE switch. I am pretty sure I can watch my Tablo when my ISP router is completely powered off. I will have to test to make sure. I did this so my Tablo/Roku traffic does not have to traverse my ISP router, and it works like a champ. The Rokus don’t touch the ISP router to get at the Tablo, and even with three TVs streaming from the Tablo, none of that traffic hits my ISP router, allowing any internet streaming devices the full power of the ISP router dedicated to internet traffic.
Shouldn’t your test include powering off then on the Roku with the ISP router off?
Or running ipconfig (or ifconfig on linux) observing the IP lease expiration time and leaving the ISP router off past IP lease expiration and then check to see if the Roku works.
Good point. If the ISP router is the DHCP server, then things will break if the ISP router stays down. But should be able to proceed with my ISP link down so long as the ISP router is up.
If my local device has its own web server, then I should be able to get to it locally without any network access to the outside world. If my device has to send out a web app to work correctly, then that’s what it should do.
What should NOT happen is that when I go to talk to my LOCAL device, I am instead told to go to the outside world and have a traffic cop then ALLOW me BACK inside my home network to talk to the device I own.
Tablo’s web access is set up in an insane manner. You fanbois really don’t get it.
As has been said, the Roku app and similar work find to connect directly to your Tablo.
But when you sit at your computer and fire up a web browser, you CANNOT connect directly to your Tablo that you own. You MUST connect to Tablo’s servers in the cloud; THEY then permit and direct you to the Tablo device that you own, and manage all the traffic between the Tablo in your basement and your PC ten feet away.
Hopefully at some point in the future, using a browser for the Tablo won’t require access.
The whole point of this thread and the responses is that @VegasSteve did not realize that almost all the Tablo apps already do not need the internet to work. Hopefully he understands that now.
This isn’t technically true. The Tablo servers are only used to determine the local IP address for your Tablo, so that the client device can then connect directly to the Tablo. The Tablo servers don’t manage all traffic between the client and Tablo. Even in the case of remote connect, the connection is direct from client to Tablo.
That said, we understand the request for a local discovery tool/method to connect to the Tablo from the PC without internet access. We’re always working to improve the experience, so stay tuned.
If you are using IPV4 with DHCP address reservation you can’t defeat the standard. Unless you are using WiFI direct, any TCP/IP peer to peer messaging will probably require an IP address. And IP addresses need to be obtained and they expire and their lease needs to be renewed.
Of course you could go with manual IP configuration. But that usually requires that RIP be properly enabled.
Then there is the whole world of IPV6. And I have a bunch of fairly new devices that don’t even attempt IPv4/IPv6 dual stack.
Adam1991…thanks for the clarification. It think both topics were in this thread, so I simply wanted to point out that there is a way to configure the network to stream without traversing the ISP router. I think this give much better performance than using the ISP router as the main switch for the entire home network.
But the main post is about using a browser app, sorry if my post seemed out of context. I am curious if the android app behaves more like the browser or more like the Roku? Can it stream (locally) without internet access?
I don’t think that’s not quite accurate either. As I understand it, the web app (http://my.tablotv.com/) is loaded from the Tablo servers not the Tablo service. If it was loaded from the Tablo device, there would be a URL targeting the IP address of the Tablo I could use to run the app.
“If it was loaded from the Tablo device, there would be a URL targeting the IP address of the Tablo I could use to run the app.”
Isn’t this the chicken and the egg problem. Don’t you have to have a LAN IP address that the URL resolves to so that the app can address the tablo unit…
As opposed to me knowing the local IP address, which I do. It’s a simple bookmark at that point.
If I know the IP address, why can’t I access it directly? At least, that’s what’s being revealed in this thread.
I work with quite a lot of network connected items, all of them horrendously expensive in the context of a Tablo. They all have built-in web servers that work completely local–no need for the user to go to the cloud to establish a connection for any reason.
And if the Roku app (for example) can connect directly without having the mothership involved, then so should Joe User on a web browser.
Unless you’re saying that I don’t have enough control in setup to establish a fixed IP address for the DVR? And therefore the DVR might be getting whatever IP address the DHCP server decided at the moment? That would also be not good.
It’s perfectly OK optionally to have the user’s Tablo account keep track of what the unit’s IP address is inside the network, and give simple users that function. It would NOT be OK to restrict everyone else from accessing it directly from a local web browser, and instead forcing everyone else to have a live internet connection just to access the DVR from a simple computer.
I think you’re missing the semantics here with word games. web “based” app is more than likely an HTML based app. As with WWW “pages” it comes from a server, like maybe lighttpd/1.4.41 running on the tablo it’s self.
So, yes, we may be surprised the tablo has a “web” server onboard yet can’t/won’t serve up anything locally -ha ha ha- without first connecting to my.tablotv.com
There are ways to know the IP address, if it’s been assigned dynamically.
But there are better ways: give the user the ability to assign a fixed address, AND let the user connect directly to the DVR at that address even if the internet is down.
Even if Tablo setup doesn’t allow setting a fixed IP address, I have the option of having my DNS server reserve an address for the Tablo so that it gets the same IP address every time. In that situation, Tablo is out of the loop and has no responsibility for the fact that it’s a known address every time. I would expect that I could then use my web browser on my computer in my home to address the web server of the unit, with no requirement for internet access at all.
But everything I’m reading says that’s not the case.
There’s this thing called mDNS which gets around that problem. The Tablo should be able to respond to a URL something like http://tablo-name.local/. But it doesn’t.
