Tablo#

As part of my plan to cut cable I added a four-tuner Tablo OTA DVR to the system.

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The Tablo is pretty small, about the size of a paperback book.

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With four tuners, I can record four things at the same time, or watch something and record three others, etc. I went for the four-tuner model rather than the two-tuner model because there are definitely a couple of shows we watch/record that run at the same time. I also wanted the ability to watch TV on a couple of different TVs while something was recording and that wouldn’t have been possible without a couple of tuners.

Storage#

Storage on the Tablo is done by plugging in an external USB hard drive. I bought my Tablo on special where a 1.5TB drive was included and that’s been working well. It’s plenty of space, even recording things at the highest resolution.

Performance#

I’ve been able to very easily watch multiple streams at the same time. No hiccups, very nice. I was worried that it would start to stutter or buffer with multiple streams transcoding to different devices simultaneously, but it’s been very smooth.

Comparison to Other DVRs#

I did the comparison to other DVR products (cost, services) as part of the plan to cut cable.