Perhaps this thread is stale … and I’m in the wrong place.
But I was looking for a Tablo-like product. What’s driving me at this time, is that the new ATSC 3.0 station in Buffalo might be easier to get a lock on than some of the 1.0 equivalents.
Which Tablo products support 3.0? Or if they aren’t out yet - when will they be out?
(no point for me buying one now that doesn’t support 3.0)
Currently, there is only one device that is on the market that supports ATSC 3.0 - the SiliconDust HDHomerun 4K. That being said, I live in Austin, TX, and they are “live” with 4 stations, but they are “rebroadcasts” of the original HD programming, only difference is AC-4 audio (instead of AC-3). Many devices lack support for AC-4 audio at this time - and the 3rd party DVR apps don’t support ATSC 3.0 broadcasts.
I have the tuner, and it isn’t ready for “prime-time” as of today. I still use my Tablo DVRs for all my recordings. And in the near future (probably the next 1-2 years), I don’t see that changing. There are too many issues out there between the broadcasters issues, the tuners having issues and the DVRs that don’t support the new codecs required for ATSC 3.0.
But do the new tuners provide better ATSC 1.0 reception and quality then the previous model?
Since the cost of equipment to record and process 4K is significant, I wouldn’t expect local content to change very soon. And advertising revenue is down due to covid. Even Sinclair had a big layoff.
HDHomerun is only DVR at this time. Hopefully Tablo gets to work.
For the HDHomeRun 4K units I have heard nothing but good things about their ATSC 1.0 performance - And that it is noticeably better than the previous generation of SiliconDust tuners. On the ATSC 3.0 side, one thing to be aware of with their current “4K” four tuner unit is that only two of the four tuners are ATSC 3.0 capable, whereas all four are ATSC 1.0 capable. It’s a bit strange to me that they didn’t just make all four tuners 1.0/3.0 capable, along with maybe moving to a gigabit Ethernet port, and be done with it for the long haul.
I owned a connect duo. Worked like a champ. I gave it to my neighbor and bought a 4K just to see if the tuners were better(?).
To me it does seem the reception was better. But I didn’t really have reception issues.
The FCC isn’t going to give out any RF frequencies to accommodate ATSC 3.0. One plan was to aggregate multiple ATSC 1.0 channels onto lighthouse channel(s) and using the freed up channels for ATSC 3.0. But if you look at the areas with ATSC 3.0 they seem to do the reverse. They stack multiple ATSC 3.0 braodcasts onto one RF channel. So why would a user need tons of ATSC 3.0 tuners.
Since most ATSC 3.0 is still 1080i or 1080p why pay for extra ATSC 3.0 tuners and ethernet that you aren’t going to need for years.
And call me next year when there is wide spread generalized cheap solution for AC-4.
What 4K content is there right now? I can get the benefit of better reception but the 4K is sorta irrelevant until actual 4K content is produced.
New, better tuners can mean that channels with weak signals have a stronger more consistent signal.
Or where tablo gets 40 signals hdhomerun gets 50 usable channel. Of course you may not be interested in the extra 10 channels.
In Austin, TX, ATSC 3.0 went “live” over a year ago. After it went “live”, it took about 6 months to get a decent picture on the 4 channels (which are rebroadcast 1080 signals, not 4K). The second station owner recently brought up their 4 channels - and the same thing that happened with the first one, it has been hit or miss for live video, and it is 1080 picture - not 4K.
I use a HDHomerun 4K, and it will allow multiple stations using the RF channel to stream (i.e. if the channel is 7.1, then you would watch/record 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 and/or 7.5 using one tuner). With ATSC 1.0, you need two or more tuners to do the same thing.
I am still using Tablo to record my programs (I have two 4-tuner models), because there isn’t an incentive to switch, as the ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are unreliable at best for the time, and there isn’t an increase in video resolution.
Theoretically, you can stack well over 30 HD channels on one RF channel for ATSC 3.0 (this hasn’t been tested in the real world yet), where ATSC 1.0 was limited in bandwidth (usually 1-2 HD channels plus 3-4 SD channels was the limit).
Going by the current rate of development, I doubt that it will widely be used as an alternative for at least 3-5 years - as 99.9% of American households can’t tune an ATSC 3.0 channel…and it will probably be 10 years or more before the ATSC 1.0 channels start going dark…
So funny how we were tossing around “3-5 years from now”… approximately 3 years ago.
(truth is, it was more like 5 years ago)
All the major station owners suffered severe ad revenue decline during covid. Thus most ATSC 3.0 plans were put on hold.
While most people refer to all 1080 as the same, ATSC 1.0 OTA maximum quality is 1080i while for ATSC 3.0 1080p would probably be more normal. 1080p would probably be most beneficial for sports.
While the Olympics were going to be broadcast in 4K who knows now. And I think they recently ran some successful tests with phones with tuners where they drove 60+ miles on a freeway with ATSC 3.0 TV reception.
I don’t believe this is entirely accurate. I had DVB tuner cards in my PC at one time. I had realized it was able to record 2 shows off the same tuner. Each “channel” of sub-channels are on the same frequencies (I’m not clear on the technicalities) and each have a PID (?) for the software to specify.
So I do believe the possibility does exist in an ATSC environment. Whether or not a device or programing implements it make the determination.
Didn’t South Korea successful rolled out ATSC 3.0 to 70% of the population over the last 3 years?
Could the U.S. lack of ATSC 3.0 have anything to do with having the major television manufactures including ATSC 3.0 tuner and AC-4 in their medium priced devices.
While I am a “tech head”, I am not a developer for any “DVR software”, nor do I understand the programming API to make it happen.
I do know, as an end user, how the DVR works (from an end user’s point of view). That was how I was relating the information. I haven’t setup the HDHomerun to record yet (deciding if PLEX or the HDHomerun software will handle it), but I have connected with two devices at once, and only using one tuner, watched two different “channels” on the same RF frequency. Every ATSC 1.0 channel I tuned in used different tuners.
Since AC-4 audio isn’t supported by quite a few devices (only the new Roku Ultra does, and support for the audio on FireTV, Android is limited, both Windows 10 and XBox One work fine), I only use it as a “toy” for now…I am not going to go out and buy streaming devices for all my TVs to make it work, especially if an update rolls out support for them…
It is way too early to spend a ton of money right now to get it working, since nothing is really “new” with ATSC 3.0 in relation to new channels, higher resolution, or even better audio (it is encoded differently, but not dramatically "better as of yet).
Who knows what tomorrow brings?
The folks at Solid Signal had a good take on the current state of affairs:
Well it is the WEB and a blog.
At least they could have indicated that some current shows are recorded on 35mm film and remastered to 4k for TV. And that some are recorded in 6k.
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