With my experience on my latest trip (my Tablo crashed and I missed more than a week’s worth of recordings), I’m back to leaning towards taking the Tablo with me on our 6-week road trip. I don’t want to risk having it crash again and missing out on potentially a month or more of recordings.
Hi MichaelColey:
We have our 5th wheel permanently parked on a lot which we own so we are not traveling BUT I have basically the same problem you have … Taking our media with us to the ‘cottage’. While my wife likes to read … a lot … I like my movies and TV series … A lot!! Can’t go a weekend/week without my movies, series shows and music.
My solution was to setup my own network in the RV using an inexpensive HooToo Wireless Travel Router. In Canada you can get them from Amazon for $36. It’s a bargain for what it does.
I’ve got a Roku 3 connected to the network created by the HooToo Router. Can’t remember if it is connected to the network wirelessly or through the ethernet jack. You’ll have to wait until spring to get the definitive answer:-)
I haven’t taken out my Tablo yet but I see no reason why you couldn’t connect the Tablo to the local network and view your recorded programs, just like at home.
I connect my laptop and Android Tablets to the network wirelessly and they all see each other, just like your home network.
I invested in an Android app called DroidTV many years ago when the lifetime membership was really inexpensive. I ‘record’ a bunch of different series episodes to my Android tablet then ‘cast’ them to my Roku through the local network described above. Worked like a charm!
http://www.mydroidtv.com/
I also have Playon (on my home computers) which allows me to record just about anything online from sites such as NetFlix, Hulu and your network websites. It also removes commercials. I just copy these recordings to a USB stick so I can play them through my notebook computer or tablet at the ‘cottage’.
All I can suggest is buying an inexpensive travel router like I did and experiment with it on your next trip (or out in your driveway before you leave). It certainly solved a lot of problems for me.
I hope this helps!!
Dale
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Yep, the travel router is definitely part of my plans. I’m probably going to follow the suggestions here and just copy shows from the Tablo to a media server and take that with me.
We’re not ones that have to watch the latest episodes immediately. Even a season later is fine with us (we used to just buy DVDs of our favorite TV shows). We don’t watch TV on a schedule, but we like to have something to watch (and especially something for the kids to watch) when we have some down time.
I’ve already accumulated a really nice library of OTA movies (about 40) and TV shows (thousands of episodes from about 60 TV shows) in the couple months since I bought the Tablo. Taking up about 1 TB out of the 4 TB drive I bought. I think that usage will drop going forward as the episodes fill in. For instance, we have 58 episodes (out of 230) of Big Bang Theory recorded, 136 episodes (out of 221) of The Lone Ranger, etc.
PlayOn.TV sounds neat. I might have to look into that. We watch some things on Netflix and Amazon Prime that we can’t get OTA, and it would be nice to download those when we have good WiFi so we can watch them later when we don’t.
I know some areas we’re planning on going won’t even have a cell signal.
I subscribe to this http://toptvshows.io/todays-tv-episodes-2018t and download TV shows from a laptop