Does anyone have experience with both Tablo and Plex Live TV & DVR? Plex just had a sale on their lifetime subscription so I bought it yesterday and started tinkering with Live TV & DVR. I have an old Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q which is technically not supported by Plex but it seems to work fine. My initial thoughts using this for only a few hours:
Setup: Plex is much more difficult to setup from both a hardware and software config perspective so if you are looking for simplicity stick with Tablo. If you want more flexibility/control and are willing to tinker with the setup then you can give Plex a whirl. Winner: It dependsā¦
Interface: This is a tough one as I am so familiar with Tablo. I think I will become equally familiar with Plex. One thing I think Plex is missing is star ratings for Movies. Winner: So far Tablo
Quality: Early indications are that Plex has a better picture quality but that can be dependent on a lot of things such as my default for Tablo is 720p/5Mbps. Winner: Unsure but I suspect Plex
Commercial skip: I just turned it on with Plex and have not yet seen the results. I am very pleased with Tabloās commercial skip. Winner: too early to tell but I suspect Tablo
Cost: This is tough so I will just mention a few points. For Tablo, you need the Tablo, an HDD, and maybe a standard or premium subscription. With Plex you need a Server, a tuner, and a subscription. The server can be many different things (Iām using an old Linux PC) but most NAS devices will not support Live TV & DVR even if they can be a Plex Server. Winner: There are too many variables depending on your setup but for me moving forward, Tablo will cost me $20/year for Commercial skip and Plex will only cost me whatever hardware improvements I may make such as an ATSC 3.0 tuner.
Early personal conclusion: I will stick with Tablo for the foreseeable future but I will tinker with Plex as a possible ATSC 3.0 solution but who knows what is on the horizon for Tablo and ATSC 3.0?
Anyone else out there have any experience/thoughts?
For #3, keep in mind that unless you are using a HDHomeRun Extend the comparison isnāt apples to apples. The Tablo converts on the fly during recording in order for the recording to be playable on more devices right away. Tuners besides the Extend record raw MPEG-2 so the quality will be higher as itās not compressed.
āon the flyā when watching live TV it is trans coded and written to disk, then streamed as with any recording. (not with tablo connect and with cloud or lite 64, āinternal storageā is used)
Iāve got Plex, Channels DVR and Tablo. I had a Tablo before I tried Plex DVR (Live TV wasnāt a thing with Plex then). The experience was not good. I eventually split Plex DVR off onto a server of itās own to try and make the experience better. I eventually gave up and tried Channels DVR. What a night and day difference. Only uses HDHomeRunās but wow how it uses them. Support and feature set was/is much better than Plex as well. It has become my primary DVR for stuff I want to record and keep.
Tablo via Roku is still my number one for viewing Live TV and DVR stuff that Iām going to delete. I love that it just works and I donāt have to mess with it. If they had an official ādownloaderā that worked the way I wanted I probably could eliminate Channels DVR but it works so well for what I use it for. Turned Plex Live TV/DVR off. Just wasnāt worth the hassle and wasnāt progressing where I thought it should be. I use Plex to view my Blu ray and DVDās as well as Channels DVR programs as Channels doesnāt have a Roku client.
The only thing that I can think of that Plex has over Tablo is multi-user and their remote access. Tabloās remote access is easy but limited. Tabloās multi-user doesnāt exist.
I also have and use both. Probably the biggest advantage to Plex DVR is number of tuners. Iāve tested with 8. Also the fact that it is integrated with Plex. Also, if Iām remote and on a foreign host, all I have to do is āloginā and presto, instant remove live TV (no pairing problem). Plex DVR EPG is free with Plex Pass. Iām already a ālifetimeā pass holderā¦ so thereās that as well.
But my āgo toā DVR is the Tablo for most things. Itās a bit more reliable, files donāt take up as much room. But maybe itās because I didnāt have Plex DVR to begin with? Also early Plex DVR had a lot of problems. Should I be using Plex DVR more now that it is better? Not sure. In many ways, it goes to show you that releasing a poor product early can sort of hurt you down the road. I still play around with Plex DVR though. But itās not where I schedule shows that matter.
With that said, Iām pretty sure that if 6+ years ago Plex DVR existed, I might have never bought a Tablo (but thatās just a guess).
Iāve been putzing around with Plex DVR on and off for the last several weeks. As soon as I get over one hurdle another pops up. I will continue to play with it but thatās just me having some fun experimenting.
My appreciation for the Tablo team has grown as I now better understand some of the decisions they needed to wrestle with and the efforts they needed to make to develop such a simple product that just works across multiple platforms. I know some people have problems but I believe the vast majority of those issues are related to the userās HDD, network, or antenna/reception problems and not the Tablo itself.
If you want to invest a lot of time and money on hardware and setup you can build a pretty sweet Plex DVR system but in some ways it will fall short of what Tablo can do. I have come to the definite conclusion that if you just want something that simply works out of the box, stick with Tablo.
I donāt believe I ever got to Plex, I do recall fighting with MythTV (similar, yet different). āBack thenā the struggle was creating the scan tables for the DVB-T tuner cards. Transitioning between version 3 and 5, and trying to find documentation that worked.
Plex, goes beyond just OTA TV, and client/server setup, which I believe why I never went that direction. If I had fast enough internet, I probably wouldnāt be screwing around with all this so much. [of course I would!!]
Good luck and I hope a day comes soon when you have the customized HTPC OTA DVR / Media Center you control at will! with your thoughts!