The way I typically like to watch sports is to wait about 30-45 minutes after the game starts and watch in what I like to call ‘Delayed Live’ mode. On Tablo, this comes with a well known limitation of not having the FFWD and RWD thumbnails as a reference for skipping commercials. Recently, I thought of a workaround of sorts to try and get the best of both worlds.
If you are aware of the sporting event ahead of time, rather than scheduling the recording from the guide, set it up as a manual recording…but not just a single manual recording. Set it up as several different manual recordings that break the game in the 15, 30, or 60 minutes segments. This will allow the Tablo to create thumbnails for each segment as they finish recording and you have the luxury of watching in Delayed Live mode AND getting thumbnails for all your commercial skipping.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t work. I plan to test the idea soon. Thought I’d share in the event that no one has come up with this idea yet.
The big flaw in this plan is that you will catch up pretty quickly to the 2nd segment. So while you can skip commercials in the first segment, you either have to wait a while for the next segment to complete, or you just watch a currently recording segment without thumbnails.
You are correct, but the dog has to pee anyway so I can find something to do while I wait if I want to…a shorter recording (and a less patient viewer) will not yield that great a benefit. But even if it was only for half the game/match/event, there is still benefit there. For me, I typically try to start viewing so that I can skip everything through halftime.
This idea came to me while watching the USOpen golf on Sunday. I had an 8 hour recording, so breaking it up into 1 hour segments means I that could have started up 4 hours late and had 4 to 6 segments to blow through before I get to anything live (or in the live segments). For a 2 hour soccer game it may not hold as much value, but a longer recording (and longer wait time to view) will increase the benefit.
@TabloTV - I hope you are listening. Products that force users to go through this type of gyration to obtain what other platforms offer “out of the box” (i.e.; thumbnails available even during just buffered live recordings) looks like a product that is not yet ready for commercial release. It may not seem like a big deal, and I seldom have the opportunity to watch live buffered TV, but when I do, this is a glaring pain-point. Family and friends look at me like “what is this and how do we actually use it like a DVR?”
Not cashing mine in any time soon, but TV (especially near-live sports events) are certainly not something I invite folks over to watch at my house any more!
Tried this last night to record the olympic trials…I will say that it did work, but not as smooth as I wanted it to be. As @cjcox suggested, the transition points were a little more painful, but that could be due to the nature of the recording. For something like a basketball game or football game, when the breaks in action can be more predictable, I still think this could work. But for a swim meet, I had no idea where to put the break and the only one I had was right in the middle of one of the races.
Another thing I don’t like is that setting up 2 one time manual recordings back to back with the same name causes the separate recordings to be treated as different shows, so they get their own individual tile. I would have expected them to be separate episodes under the same tile. This adds to the hassle while transitioning.
I have been trying something similar to this with not much luck. I first scheduled the recording using the guide. Then in the middle of the show, I stopped it from recording, and then started it to record again, which broke up the show into 2 separate recordings. I expected to see thumbnails generated on the 1st recording about 5 minutes after I stopped it from recording. (Yes there was a tuner available to generate thumbnails) The only way I could get it to generate thumbnails was to wait for the show to be completely over, which thereby defeats the purpose of breaking it up into multiple recordings. I tried it several times on different TV shows, with no luck.
If 2 tuners are available, the Tablo uses 2 tuners when recording a 720p channel when Max Recording Quality is set to HD 1080 - 10Mbps, 720@60fps.
Tablo Support confirmed this when I reported I thought my tuners were not all being used.
My solution was to lower Max Recording Quality to HD 1080 - 8Mbps.
Thank you. Could you let us know if this gets fixed? It would definitely be an enhancement to watching football games. I like to watch games delayed, but not after they are over. It would be fantastic to have the ability to start watching a game an hour into it (or whenever I want to start watching it) and simply go the guide, stop recording, start recording a second segment of it, wait 5 minutes for the thumbnails to generate, and voila, watch the game delayed with thumbnails.