Tablo vx HDHomeRun

General Discussion
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Tablo vs. HDHomeRun

After continuing serial recording issues with our Fire Recast and lack of support from Amazon, we bought the HDHomeRun 4 channel, an Amazon recommended device. We also had to buy a terabyte external drive for recording and buy an annual subscription to the TV guide for the unit to operate.

We found the HDHomeRun easy to install, a bit cumbersome to operate, and not well integrated with the Fire Cube controller, especially with the forward and reverse on recorded shows. We have a 500Mbps mesh network and the HDHomeRun is slow to process forward and reverse commands and often returns with a completely black screen with the recorded show sound track. The only way to correct is to close the application, restart the app and continue where we left off. Note that when forward and reverse did work , it often would skip between 5 and 10 minutes ahead, instead of in 30 second intervals - very annoying. Called HDHomeRun technical services, the agent was very nice and tried to be helpful. Indicated that there is some software bug causing this, several customers had called in with the same issue but that there is no current fix, as they have been unable to recreate the problem on their side.

We ordered a 4th Generation Tablo, 4 channel unit. It comes with a 50 hr recording capacity and no extra cost TV guide. We operated the HDHomeRun and the Tablo side by side for a little over a week.

The Tablo was also very easy to install, has a much easier to use intuitive user interface, integrates well with Fire Stick and Fire cube controllers and our mesh network, and operates forward and reverse properly and responds faster to commands. In fact it offers two methods to fast forward/reverse - a 5 second or so fast forward and a faster speed forward showing at the frame of where the show is both proceeding and following the current FF location – a very convenient feature. No skipping ahead 5 or 10 minutes like with HD HomeRun.

Both the HDHomeRun and Tablo identify the same OTA channels and do boosts the OTA signals, but in my side-by-side comparison there was more periodic pixalization interferance with the HDHomeRun on less strong channels than with Tablo. Tablo also presents several streaming channels (free streaming showing classic/legacy movies and several others in our market. ) Picture wise, the Tablo recording playback seems sharper than HDHomeRun, both with the internal flash drive and with the 1 TB drive we reformatted from the HD HomeRun unit.

Overall the Tablo works better than FireRecast ever did, works better than the current generation of HD HomeRun. We ultimately returned the HDHomeRun, are very pleased with Tablo and Tablo would be our recommendation.

Made me wonder that the financial arrangement between Amazon and HDHomeRun with that 4 channel unit being a ‘recommended’ Amazon offering which is more expensive, less user friendly and requires the purchase of a hard drive and annual TV guide subscription.

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When Tablo is functioning properly it is a wonderful machine. The main problem is the live TV guide reliability and all the different apps the Tablo is trying to work with. I think Tablo should of really focused on Roku as the leader in streaming boxes like it or not. My main gripe with Tablo is no manual recording by time slot when the live guide is wrong or when there is missing guide date. In Chicagoland area 3.1-3.15 channels don’t have guide data and will not get it. Would be nice to be able to record these channels if I wanted to. FYI there are a few that I would record, one of them being Bark-TV when they have segment on dog grooming as an example. At least Tablo did implement off-line mode if your internet goes down.

Also Tablo has been promising us remote access of our Tablo units to at least set up a recording when we are away from home. I for one am waiting for this feature. But all in all I keep saying with all of these OTA units you pick your poison and live it with. For the money Tablo is hard to beat especially at the sale price. Hopefully Tablo will have a new box out that supports ATSC-3.0. I looked at the Homerun myself and their forum and realized all of these units have issues.

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I have a legacy HDMI. It can pick up 3.1 because that is still MPEG2. I only added it in as a test, but it did have guide data for BingeTV.

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I did almost the same thing, comparison wise. I have the 2 tuner versions of both, both with usb hard drives for recording. I have 3 different boxes: nvidia shield on one tv; onn 4k box on another tv; and a roku on yet a third tv.

As all boxes provide different experiences with each of the Tabli and HDHR (there are pluses and minuses for each), I find myself using the HDHR on the tvs with the nvidia shield and the onn box most often, and on the Roku, the Tablo.

The picture quality for me across each is about the same. I have found the HDHR to be much more reliable, from boot-up, recording, closed captions, and guide quality, just to name a few things.

I use Tablo on Roku, mostly, because some of the HDHR functions on Roku are limited or not there, not because the Tablo is necessarily better.

With my Tablo, my closed captions work sometimes at best. As I have hearing impaired family members, this is unacceptable.

I never have an issue with CC on the HDHR, on any platform.

Therefore, for me, my goto device is the HDHR.

Thanks for your review, it got me thinking about my preference. Much appreciated!

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They would have left out a big group of people if they hadn’t included Google/Android TV. See below.

Google has significantly more users than Roku, with Google TV/Android TV having over 270 million active monthly devices and Roku having over 89.8 million active accounts as of late 2024.

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Okay but Tablo is not for European market which is where a lot of the numbers are obtained from. Roku has the lead for the USA market which is where Tablo is marketed for.
I want Tablo to work on as many machines as possible I just thought being a small company they should of concentrated on the major one for it intended market.:grinning_face::grinning_face::grinning_face:

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I bought a Tablo gen 4 as a potential replacement for my Recast (if/when Amazon finally ditch it). They perform almost identically and offer pretty much the same features. The recast has had recent problems with the recording of series but I understand that has pretty much been fixed. So, I see it as six-of-one and half-dozen of the other - but hopefully Tablo with continue active support of the Gen 4 while Amazon has abandoned future development of the Recast.

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It’s not that Tablo isn’t developing a solid app for Roku. The issue is in part with the Roku OS. Roku has had multiple issues with recent OS updates. I think a year or 2 ago they had to rollback an update because of severe issues. Recently the version 14 update had audio format issues which would cause the Tablo app to crash. The Android OS is a more flexible system which allows the Tablo app to run more smoothly without some of the common glitches users report on Roku devices. We were Roku users from 2008 or 2009 when they first came to the market. For the first 10-12 years it was a solid device. We ended up dropping Roku for android based OS because of how well they operate in comparison. Android based systems are more widely used than what the data indicates. It’s not just Google. It also includes ONN, Firestick, Nvidia, and a few others. Roku is a still a large streaming device company, but they have a lot of bugs in their OS.

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I gotta add, if you want to see a real litany of horrors, just go to the SiliconDust HDhomerun forum (setup and troubleshooting)!!!