You are obviously not here to seek help, just for a rant. I asked some very relevant questions with regards to seeing if the community could help sort out why you’re having issues, no answers to them or even an acknowledgement of them.
It is very likely your expert troubleshooting could benefit from others expertise as well, there are many helpful possibly more intelligent people here. Plus Tablo Support is stellar at looking into issues.
But if you want to do it on your own, that’s your prerogative. Good luck.
Don’t know how “expert” this AV expert is, but clearly not enough to problem solve or heed the helpful advice of others more familiar with this system.
You are completely right and I apologize. No one here has any right to question your experience or judge you on what troubleshooting you may or may not have done.
In our defense, the title of your thread, and the tone of your initial post seemed inflammatory. Calling it the worst DVR ever does not lend itself to be an open and balanced conversation. This really is a great community and we are not shy to criticize Tablo or suggest other products for those with needs that don’t align with the Tablo. To Tablo’s credit - they don’t censor that. They stand behind their product and have the confidence to acknowledge the good and the things they understand they need to work on.
I just want to reiterate the only point that really matters. Your experience is abnormal and unacceptable. If you are interested in getting it solved, we all need to leave the rhetoric behind and focus on what you need.
If you have given up on this product, and are no longer interested in trying to make it work, then this thread does not have any further value. You voiced your concerns and they can be viewed and considered by others.
I think it’s pretty badass… works flawless with my four local Amazon FireTV’s and two remote ones. I hate it for you but I couldn’t be happier… works great for me, brother, and his gf… I absolutely love the skip ahead feature too… getting past the commercials is the easiest system I have experienced… This thing has come a LONG way…
Try Channel Master, mine got so hot the smell of burnt paint drove me to toss it as my condo reeked of the stupid thing and I thought it would burst into flames at any moment.
I read your input with interest as you began by stating your credentials… I am not tech savvy and have has my issues with Tablo/Roku. I also continue to be critical of the Tablo marketing emphasis on Roku. My only comment to you is that, even with a Roku2 and 3 my load times are reasonable - 14/15 seconds for Wifi and 12/13 seconds for wired. For me Channel Master was horrible and TIVO came in with a cost that my wife rejected - “If we are paying that much, stick with cable.” Good luck on your quest.
We’ve been using Tablo for over a year with ATV and various flavors of jailbroken iOS with mostly older iPads. Tablo is hardwired to a gigabit connection and we have never used the wireless abilities of the Tablo.
If you don’t “sync” the tablet to the TabloTV on a regular basis, you can have a 1-2 minute wait as the app downloads the guide and picture info from the Tablo. Once that is done, the app runs immediately with no delay. Picking a channel on Live TV is about a 10 second delay. Recorded stuff typically takes about 5-10 seconds to buffer.
Overall, we are very pleased with the device and would buy another. Yes, the device takes some getting used to when compared to traditional DVR’s. We never considered Tivo because they didn’t have the ability to stream to a tablet.
App syncing aside, I struggled for many months with problems that sound exactly like yours. In addition I had a problem where the channel scanner showed that the stations would have max signal (5 Green) but trying to watch the channel would giver an error stating that the signal was too weak. I eventually identified the cause as the signal booster on the line. Running the antenna into the Tablo without the booster fixed the problems.
Since I have to split the signal a dozen times to reach all of the rooms in my house, I used a special splitter that reduces one output only a tiny bit and the second but much more. I ran the strong line to the tablo and the weak line to the booster, which has the other splitters on it.
A secondary issue I was having was due to having the Tablo channel installed in Plex. After using the channel a few times in Plex, some type of network overload would develop causing everything on my network have connectivity problems. I just unistalled the channel from Plex to fix that one.
I don’t know if any of this applies to you or not, but I wanted to post it just in case.
Because so many of you like your Table so much, I decided to contact “support”. Ironically they first tried to explain that the reason I’m having so much trouble, is because when watching live TV the Tablo has to transcode the video live (effectively creating a copy as the live broadcast comes in), whereas Internet streaming services like Netflix are already streaming a copy. The irony here is that I had (unintentionally) not made it clear that I was trying to watch a recorded version of X-files (see above in my original post) not a live one! So, the “trans-code” explanation is full of what comes out of the back end of a bull…
I did as they asked, and put my Tablo into a mode allowing them remotely troubleshoot it. I then received an e-mail from them telling me that they couldn’t get in, and would I mind lowering the resolution so that ChromeCast could work more easily, proving how bad their “tech support” is (giving up on the first try) and they know how much their product sucks. This wouldn’t even address the problem of it taking 2-4 minutes to just get the app operating and video onto any device…
I’ve now also become aware that part of the app delay has to do with the fact that any mobile device using the app has to sync to the Tablo. I tried leaving the app running on my iPod Touch, only letting the screen turn off, but not leaving the app. When I came back to it from it sitting overnight, after turning the screen back on, it still had to sync. Yet more proof of how awful this thing is. I’ve put
For those who think I’m here just to “rant”. That is partially true. My goal is to generate as much Internet chatter as possible to warn as many people as possible as to how bad this thing is.
Eh, I thinks I know what an “expert” is. If you don’t like the dam thing, sell it, return it and move ON!!! They are a few thousand of us that have the correct equipment hooked up the right way and we are very happy with Tablo and the support team!!!
Eh, I thinks if you’ll buy the Tablo, AND the hard drive AND the annual subscription (I’m so glad I didn’t opt for the lifetime!) at full price, I would consider it…
Eh, I thinks if you’ll read my post, and see all the troubleshooting that was done (this was not done with Tablo tech support, but on my own) you’ll see that the equipment IS hooked up correctly.
Eh, if I can correctly hook up 58 TVs to 42 satellite receivers AND 10 Apple TVs AND 6 Mac Minis, through 2 HDMI over HDBase-t matrices and use BOTH AMX and Crestron to control and program all of that equipment with 16 iPads in a 32,000 sq’ home (be sure to let me know how much of that statement you need me to explain further), I think (know, really) I can hook up 1 internet streaming device to my 1 TV…
Did you NOT read my ENTIRE post? I’m having similar issues with Apple product, too. Honestly, how many different devices AM I supposed to try to use with this thing?
First, I strongly disagree with the topic of this thread. I have been running the Tablo 4 tuner for a little over a week. It is not as good as WMC was for locally stored recordings and live. That being said, Tablo is a good DVR. I am currently utilizing SiliconDust HDHomeRun Connect as my live viewing tuner due to its better response time.
Tablo is not a multinational giant like MS, so I do not expect the teams of developers working 24 hours a day to make everything the way I want it. Since MS is abandoning WMC, I needed something to replace that functionality, which I have right now using a combination of Android TV Devices, Google Live Chanels, -AND- Tablo. The better part is that I see the potential of this solution.
But can’t correctly communicate his problem with Tablo Support
And no, I am not going to read your entire rant above… If I had the slightest inkling that you were looking for assistance, I would. Unfortunately you are not.
Good luck, when you are ready to sell your Tablo post a price and I am sure you will find many happy buyers here.
I’m really sorry to hear about your problems. But I am using my Tabo right now to watch SVU on my iPad Air running iOS 9.2.1, it works flawlessly. I hit play, I get video in 1 second. It took 10 seconds to sync, but yes this was a re-sync as it had sync’d previously.
I can confirm the same experience on iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 - so that’s 4 different Apple device with the same flawless experience.
Maybe you have a defective Tablo? It’s a very straight forward device.
@A_V_Expert - If you’d like us to continue with troubleshooting you just have to reply to the last email and your ticket will automatically be re-opened.