Full disclosure, I’ve got a 4 Tuner Tablo with lifetime guide, and Plex with Plex Pass…so, some of what I describe below might not work 100% the same for you.
Tablo-for-Channels (GitHub - tmm1/tablo-for-channels: M3U generator optimized for Channels' custom channels.). This is a little project that was written for a product I’m not familiar with called Channels DVR (Channels — Channels DVR Server)…but what this little tool does is it makes the Tablo Tuners available as an M3U Playlist. This in and of itself is kinda cool, because it means you can play your Tablo through something like VLC, or really anything that supports M3U
xTeVe (GitHub - alturismo/xteve: xteve, in docker with cron). This little tool is an HDHomerun Emulator. The one that I’ve linked to is just one of the xteve variants out there…but it’s the one I’m using atm :).
Just FYI…I’m a bit of a home lab nut and I work in IT…so I have all sorts stuff around that some people might not have and might not be willing to run…but…with that said, YMMV.
So…I stood up Tablo for Channels real quick, just a single environment variable telling it what the IP for my Tablo was, that’s it…it was up and running and fully functional. Then I stood up xTeVe…this one was a bit more difficult, but the final config was easy…in it’s settings I setup the EPG Source as PMS, and told it the number of tuners I had then under Streaming, I told it to use FFmpeg for buffering…then in Playlists I gave it the URL of the Tablo for Channels play list and told it there were 4 tuners…
Once those two pieces are setup I go into Plex → Settings → Manage → Live TV & DVR and tell it to add a device…it auto detected the HDHomerun Server (xTeVe), and I mapped my channels after telling Plex where I live…and since then I have access to the tuners through Plex. Plex auto gets the guide, and I have the ability to record and watch my shows on Plex…Plex does its own commercial detection…I’ve essentially stopped using the Tablo interface at all and am using it solely as the hardware that’s providing the tuners. I’ve had to do some tweaking like ‘record an extra min at the end’ by default and such, but beyond that my experience with using Tablo as a Tuner for Plex has been working really well…
I don’t know if anyone else is using this configuration, or if anyone is interested in it…but I’d be happy to provide details to anyone with questions if there are any
What hardware are you running your Plex server on? I’m in IT as well so I get the tinker part of things (I’ve got my UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra being delivered tomorrow) but I’m also getting older so the younger me that also used to flash Android ROMs every other day is gone so I’m in the phase where I still like to tinker, but I also want to simplify my setup a little.
One of the things that resulted in me purchasing a Tablo many years ago even while having a lifetime Plex Pass just as you do, is it didn’t require a separate machine to run PMS, everything was being done in the Tablo box.
Very impressive. I, too, have an OG Tablo 4 channel. I will be following your testing and evolution of your system on Plex, which I’ve used since the earliest days.
Thank you for sharing, and I look forward to your updates!
Thanks for posting this LJ! I’d come across Tablo-For-Channels at some point, but hadn’t seen xTeVe before.
After seemingly getting this setup in Plex, I get the error “Playback Error Could not tune channel. Please check your tuner or antenna.” When I get the URL for the specific stream from xTeVe’s log (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8050/watch/21), VLC is able to play it fine.
Hmmm…I have no experience with any xTeVe other than the one I posted…which seems ironically to be one of the oldest ones I’m finding now that I’m looking around. Which implementation did you end up going with?
So…port 8050, that’s going to be the Tablo-for-Channels port…yes…I can access those through VNC as well…but that’s unfortunately not testing xTeVe…when I look at my Plex settings, this is what I see, do you see something similar?
for me, Tablo is the name of my xTeVe playlist…docker is the name of my docker host, and 34400 is the port that xTeVe is running on in that docker. I have 19 channels configured, and as previously stated…I have a 4 tuner. In this particular screen shot, none of them are in use…if I make one of them be busy…one of the dots turns red
Yes, that’s more or less what I see in Plex settings, except I have 1 tuner status dot (as expected), a different number of channels, and different IP address. I named my playlist “Tablo (Gen2) Tablo-For-Channels”, but could that really make a difference?
I was just guessing.
If you told the xTeVe playlist that you had 2 tuners, I would personally expect 2 circles, not one…but I’m not sure that’s the issue atm…here is a section of log from xTeVe from when I start, and then stop a stream
2024-02-26 12:03:01 [xTeVe] Buffer: true [ffmpeg]
2024-02-26 12:03:01 [xTeVe] Buffer Size: 1024 KB
2024-02-26 12:03:01 [xTeVe] Channel Name: KRDO-HD
2024-02-26 12:03:01 [xTeVe] Client User-Agent: Lavf/LIBAVFORMAT_VERSION
2024-02-26 12:03:02 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Playlist: Tablo - Tuner: 1 / 4
2024-02-26 12:03:02 [xTeVe] FFMPEG path: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
2024-02-26 12:03:02 [xTeVe] Streaming URL: http://docker:8050/watch/563013
2024-02-26 12:03:02 [xTeVe] FFMPEG: Processing data
2024-02-26 12:03:02 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Receive data from FFMPEG
2024-02-26 12:03:02 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Buffering data from FFMPEG
2024-02-26 12:06:52 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Client has terminated the connection
2024-02-26 12:06:52 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Channel: KRDO-HD (Clients: 0)
2024-02-26 12:06:53 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Channel: KRDO-HD - No client is using this channel anymore. Streaming Server connection has ended
2024-02-26 12:06:53 [xTeVe] Streaming Status: Playlist: Tablo - Tuner: 0 / 4
FYI, I just stood up the same xTeVe that you are running
I’m running it as a docker in the same host as the other one (other one is stopped), same configuration that I had in the other instance, and it’s working for me…so, we can rule out that version of the tool not working…
Now, we just need to mess with the config to get it working. FYI…I still see 4 circles in Plex, so if you are only seeing one, that might mean that you don’t have the proper number of tuners defined somewhere…I saw that there are two places…one in the play list, and the other in settings…not sure why there are 2 places, but I have both of them set to 4 in my situation.
I’m actually using tablo_npvr which is a Python port of Tablo For Channels and which doesn’t use Docker.
It seems I may have had two problems. That first is that I was using Stream Buffer set to “No Buffer”. The other was I tried setting “Timeout for new client connections” to 2500, but forgot to set it back.
For whatever it’s worth, I was only seeing 1 status dot, because that’s how I set it up (which is why I said “as expected”, which apparently wasn’t clear).
You may want to switch to Threadfin which is a fork of xTeVe with much more recent development work. (It didn’t work for me though, at the channel mapping step in the Plex config. It may have something to do with the leading zero for ZIP codes in New England.)
