Tablo via Chrome browser on phone no longer works for me

Grumble.  Been awhile since I used my Tablo (via Chrome browser) on my
phone.  Now it doesn’t work.  Says my version isn’t supported… wants to
spawn a video player… and that doesn’t work at all just tons of
failed loads and blinking and argh!!


Btw… it all worked perfectly before… albeit not awesome, but at least it worked.  So… no more remote TV for me… sigh…

I reported this as well. Found that this web app change now allows me to use MX player on my phone for Tablo, which I love. This fixed a long standing Tablo fail, in which Tablo wouldn’t play on my android phone. So all in all, this is a good thing.

Also found i could still use the chrome browser to cast Tablo from my phone (MX player doesn’t do that at all) but I’m lucky if a Chromecast video reliably plays… So that’s still a Tablo phone fail.

Anyway, get MX player and see if you can play videos on your phone again. It won’t be as smooth of an experience as before… But that’s the way of things.

http://community.tablotv.com/discussion/725/lost-ability-to-chromecast-from-android-phone#latest

I’ve tried to use MX Player, but Chrome always launches the chrome video player for me.  Every video section in app associations says to use MX Player, but no dice.

Anyway, I discovered that using the android video player in non full screen seems to work and then I can pinch expand the video to almost get full screen (all but the android notification bar at the top)… so it’s close and works just about as well as it did before.

My phone is old (that is less than 2 years but longer than 2 days… 2 days apparently being a long time in phone life)… so it’s running the old outdated and never to be updated Android 4.1.1 (can’t be fixed without breaking features of the phone… that is, rooting and using community roms isn’t always a “good idea”)

Sigh… android has its problems…

So… anyhow… I guess I’m ok, it’s incovenient… but workable.

But definitely works differently from how it used to work.  Before I could force the browser into full screen.  That would get rid of the top bar, but unfortunately the TabloTV web app video control overlay would not remove itself (and since that’s a bit bigger than the android nofication bar, I guess arguably while simpler, didn’t give me as much real estate as this new inconvenient way)

Going full screen with the Android player just gives you the “sorry this video cannot be played” mesage and you get audio only and you really can’t go back at that point if you do, the video is just stuck on the screen where you left it when you originally went full screen.  Sigh…  what a mess…

I’ve used MX Player to allow Plex to work (albeit, not as nicely as the built in when it works)… but I can’t make MX Player work with the chrome web browser app solution under 4.1.1.

Oh… and for anyone that does remember the old behavior and wants it back… just tell Chrome to request the desktop site and you pretty much get the original behavior except now the web app fake video control overlay will block the top most part of your full screen instead of the bottom (maybe that’s better?  So much stuff, like scores and news, scrolls across the bottom of the screen on TV).


@cjcox We’re having a hard time reproducing this here - we’ll have to see if we can get our hands on an older device to test this. Sorry for the wait.

Oh… sorry… my long text was too wordy.  I’ve resolved my issue.  It’s just that it works differently, but it’s ok.  I have the normal can’t go fullscreen using the player control problem, but I can pinch zoom it and that’s ok for now.

The blinking weird thing was Chrome attempting to launch the video player using the old Internet Browser (what Android had before they came with Chrome).

I wouldn’t mind seeing MX Player work, but I’m ok with the built in video player working after I pinch zoom it.



Android, app info (for the chrome app), launch by default, clear defaults button… I use the “hold home” button trick to get into the task manager “downloaded” apps list to manage chrome “app info”.

That should do it. Then the Tablo “launch player” button should give you the android select app to open with menu, with MX player listed. Good luck.

@Thumbs, there’s a big difference between Android 4.1 and later versions.  All that existed way back then was “Internet” with regards to a browser (a very basic browser).  You have adjust the Web URL default app to Chrome to get things to work at all for Android 4.1.  But as far as I know, there isn’t a way to get a chooser to come up when the Launch is hit.  On my version, that’s just an external URL request and so it ends up getting handed off to Chome (after you make the default for Web URLs change). And then you get the Chome/Android (?) video player… which again, it works ok… so I’m ok with that.