Tablo - QUAD OTA DVR - Black

This is a review from a regular, non technical person. We cut the cord. My husband still has quite a few OTA TV shows he records and watches. After reading dozens of reviews we selected this. We purchased this over the Lite as it can do more. We read that there were connectivity issues with external drives so we installed a 1TB laptop hard drive inside it. Also purchased a little fan for it to sit on to stay cool. Out of the box, put in hard drive, 1 minute, plug in Antenna and Ethernet (app will guide you through Wi-Fi if needed, power it on. We used an iPad app, PC, Mac and Android apps available. Once on it populates stations, and recommends only 720 or higher stations but you are free to pick the rest if desired. You can redo this anytime if you have to move the antenna. It comes with a months worth of free guide and commercial skip, we plan to buy the year service when its over, Changing channels is a bit slow while it loads and takes a minute for picture to come in clear. Picture is good and it saves having an antenna in every room. You can set shows to record on you tablet easily. The price of all the equipment and guide is what or Satellite provider was going to charge us in 2.5 months for very basic service when they jumped the rates on everyone. This only streams OTA stations in your area, picture quality will be what station broadcast in, (We have 38 in our area and selected 14 that are 720/1080 and 2 that are 480) it does not stream cable channels. (the only improvement would be to allow the guide to integrate with premium channel streamers you subscribe to so you have it all together.) I feel it is a good one time investment.

I love it!! Easy to set up and use. Just shy of 5 stars but too good to give it 4; lost a little because sometimes the automatic commercial skip does not activate. It is very easy to fast forward through because once the recording is finished thumbnails are displayed as you fast forward. The web app @ Tablo.com is great, it makes programming recordings a little easier than doing it through my Roku mostly because of again, thumbnails. Finding more programs than I am used to. I am hard-wired to my router for the main TV and other locations are using WIFI with no problem. In the picture, Tablo is to the left, router in the center, and cable modem to the right.

It record well. It still function after 2 years. I had close call with it when it wouldn't connected to my WIFI router, so i connect it using an ethernet to my router, then I upgraded its firmware via my.tablotv.com website.

Easy to set up! Was wanting to record tv shows great local channels. Used indoor Antenna works well with the Hard drive I purchased too at Best Buy. Have slow internet and it still works really well. Cutting the cord. Great buy. Well worth the purchase !

Most of the reviews for this product on BestBuy are pretty good, but that is not the case elsewhere. Having now used my Tablo QUAD for several weeks, I want to give you the information you will need to get the best experience. With the right setup, this is a really good product! (I will discuss below why I rated it 4 rather than 5 stars.) In my opinion, I was a perfect candidate for the Tablo QUAD: [1] Coming from Verizon FiOS TV which I watched using Windows Media Center (WMC) and networked cable tuners from another vendor. Prices kept increasing, even with a slimmed-down bundle. [2] To support this, I wired my house with gigabit Ethernet. (I am a retired computer professional.) [3] Have used wired Roku 3 streaming players for years. [4] Had installed a rooftop antenna with mast-mounted amplifier about 8 years ago for a couple of "light usage" TVs. [5] I am only 7 miles away from most local broadcasters and get strong, mostly clean signals. So, I was familiar with the concept of a whole-house networked DVR, I already had fast wired networking, I already had Rokus running, and I was occasionally watching OTA TV on a couple of TVs. This is significant - especially the wired v. wireless networking and strong, clean OTA broadcast signals - because, from what I have read in other reviews, I am pretty sure the problems many people have seen are mostly due to weak/poor broadcast TV transmissions and/or slow, poor or overloaded WiFi. INSTALLATION: I purchased a 2.5" 1TB disk drive (type recommended on Tablo web site) - enough for about 250 hours of HD recording, much more than I will need - and installed it as specified in the provided slot. It is VERY IMPORTANT to follow the installation instructions EXACTLY and NOT power-up the Tablo until the instructions tell you to do that. After powering the device, I used a nearby PC on the same network to go to the specified my.tablotv.com web site which found my Tablo and began the initial configuration, including a channel scan. I also set up an account at tablotv.com so I could subscribe to the 14-day electronic program guide and automatic commercial skip features. First 30 days free; various pricing thereafter, but works out to about $6-$7/month. Very reasonable compared to my Verizon bill, even if I only had local channels. Most local stations looked as good on my large main-room TVs as I was used to with FiOS TV. There were occasional but pretty rare brief pixelations, but I saw that from time to time even with FiOS. Unfortunately, the exception was my local CBS affiliate. It had major pixelation and even blanking of the screen. Long story short, I was not the only person seeing this problem. Tablo Support was very responsive, including looking at signal quality via a remote access feature which can be initiated by the customer. (Allows them to look at the Tablo, nothing else.) It turns out the CBS station's signal was strong but had a large amount of interference. The most likely explanation of the poor picture, in my opinion, is the transcoding the Tablo does to reduce the size of the data stream. The original signal's interference is probably degrading that. The good news is that around late April or early May, the FCC "repack" will force my local channels to different radio frequencies (keeping their same virtual channel numbers). This should result in the CBS station being on a much cleaner RF channel which hopefully with fix the pixelation issue. I reduced my rating from 5 to 4 stars in anticipation a better CBS signal will fix the pixelation. If it does, the Tablo will earn 5 stars. The FCC repack brings up a good point: As with any OTA reception, if the broadcast channels change frequencies, you will need to do a rescan. This is required on TVs and also on the Tablo. The process is very easy and these changes don't typically happen very often. The Tablo DVR has worked very well. It is easy to set up recordings - although I had one PBS show that appeared in the guide 2 different ways and had to set up both - and easy to watch them using a Roku. I also tried my smartphone, which worked fine. Note that the user interface can be slightly different depending on whether you use smartphone app, Roku app, browser, etc. According to the vendor, about 1/2 of Tablo owners use a Roku, so it's not surprising that is a mature and polished interface, in my opinion. The DVR has typical features for series like "Record Only New" v. "Record All". It supports pre- and post-padding, such as to extend recording times for live shows. But it also has a nice feature to auto-extend live shows by 50% of the show's scheduled broadcast duration. A check-box sets that option globally. You can also create "VCR-style" recordings: start and stop time on a particular channel. The biggest thing it is missing compared to what I was used to (Windows Media Center) is the ability to create keyword-search recordings. For example, I like beach volleyball and could set up a series recording for any show on any channel which had "Beach Volleyball" in the title or description. Can't do that with Tablo. The 14-day grid-style program guide is pretty much what you would expect, but it may be slower than what you may be used to. The Windows Media Center grid I had been using was VERY fast, but that product is no longer supported by Microsoft. Some people seem to have had bad experiences with the automatic commercial skip feature. For me, it has been close to perfect. The feature requires a good quality recording, so poor quality broadcast signals (for whatever reason) can cause it to fail. Occasionally, a commercial is not skipped, but that has been pretty uncommon in my experience. When it works - which for me has been most of the time - it is WONDERFUL. It's almost like viewing a show on a service like Netflix, with no commercial interruptions, but just a couple of seconds of blank screen where the commercials used to be. If you really want to see a commercial, you can use the fast-forward and fast-reverse to do so. The commercials are still in the recording, they are just skipped. One small surprise is that previews of next week's show are usually skipped. Not a big deal to me. I have NOT used the remote viewing feature, where you can view DVR recordings outside your house, because I am not comfortable "punching a hole" (so to speak) in my network firewall. I only need to watch DVR'd shows at home. If you turn that on, you may need to know more about your router than you care to. In addition, remember that the quality of the streaming to your phone or tablet will depend on the end-to-end network quality and speed between your home and wherever you are. If you have trouble viewing remotely, the problem may NOT be with the Tablo! BOTTOM LINE: In the right environment and depending on what you are looking for, this can be a GREAT product. Just be sure to understand the specifics before commiting.

We have used this for awhile now. We also have Tivo but needed something that could be used room to room without extra equipment. It is simple to setup and use with a streaming device (Firestick/Roku). We have it hooked to Ethernet which is probably a much better option than WiFi. Since we have Eero Pro as a router we could have also used the Ethernet plug on that as well. The really nice part of using house wired Ethernet is that when our internet was down ... our other equipment which is also on Ethernet ... the Tablo acted as an Intranet device. TiVo's will do the same thing when connected to Ethernet however you must have a receiver at each end point unlike Tablo which uses an app on streaming devices. I actually prefer the simplicity of Tablo to Tivo. Tivo is the gold standard for DVR's but it became bloated over the years and more step intensive. It has many more features not the least of which is the ability to stream some major service players however with streaming sticks so cheap, and loaded with the capabilities of many Apps, it is very outdated. A sad end to a great franchise. However, Tablo is perfect for the cord cutting community and is reasonably priced. Picture and audio quality are great as well. Did

Overall this with an antenna is just as good if not better than cable for basic channels. Can save a lot of monthly money for sure. There are a few issues though. First the included (short) Ethernet cable was defective and ruined numerous recordings until I figured out it was defective. More importantly the software leaves a lot to be desired. Bugs like displaying the wrong time for several weeks until a patch was available for daylight savings time was annoying. Also before watching the first option is delete the recording. Oddly after watching it if you push forward it restarts and if you exit the program after finish watching, again the first option is to restart. A lot of excess clicking. Overall though it’s a big saving and good enough for cutting the cord, as someone who had cable withTiVo for years this is plenty good enough I think for most.

I like this unit better than I thought I would. I bought this because Youtube TV raised their prices and I figured I could get nearly everything there via other cheaper streaming services (basic Hulu is great, BTW) and an OTA DVR like this. I went with Tablo because the monthly guide subscription is so much cheaper than Tivo's. I paired it with a $25 indoor antenna near a window and it works really well. But I'm lucky that I'm only about 4 miles from a cluster of TV transmission towers, and my window looks right at them. I had a 750GB hard drive from an old laptop sitting around and popped it in. Very easy to install and get it set up. It has no remote. You access it from a smartphone app, Roku and/or Google TV (Android TV) app and other streaming dongles/boxes. It looks to me like the Roku app is the best of the lot, and the Android/Google TV app is behind on the features (no search function that I can find). The reason I took one star off is because the client apps are a bit clunky and could really use some updating to make them less made-in-a-basement looking. Also it seems you do need a good strong antenna signal, or the interface gets flaky and the error messages are not helpful. It was locking up and skipping lots of recordings until I moved the antenna right in front of the window. But since then it has been very stable and the recordings look great. Depending on where you are you may need an outside strong antenna. So consider that before purchasing.