Tablo Dual LITE [TDNS2B-02-CN] Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] - with WiFi, Live TV Streaming, Black

This is my 2nd Tablo Dual. I've had the Tablo Dual 64 (with built-in 64GB storage) for about three years in my primary residence. I recently bought this Tablo Dual Lite (requires external hard drive) for my winter home in Florida. For a cord cutter who gets television over the air, these are the best DVRs that I've found. Here are some of the strong points:* Connects to your TV antenna and router (wired or wireless.) I use the wired connection to the router for simplicity. I can then watch live and recorded TV programs on every smart-equipped TV in my house. My TV's are either Roku TV's or have a Fire Stick, all with Wi-Fi connections. There's no need to run an antenna cable to each TV. With the Tablos, the TVs don't need to be near the unit. This greatly simplifies moving TV's around because there are no boxes or wiring except to plug into AC power.* Program guide is very well laid out with logical navigation. For channel surfing, ignoring the guide, I can press the up arrow on the Fire or Roku remote and scroll by channel number, easily jumping between programs.* Automatic Commercial Skip function is fantastic. It's not available on all shows, but when the show qualifies, a timeline is presented that shows where the commercials have been detected (by the Tablo server) and the player knows to automatically jump past them when viewing.* Manual program scanning is fast and facilitated by show icons large enough to rapidly jump to particular parts of a show, skip commercials, etc.* I can remotely view live and recorded programs on my smart phone or laptop from anywhere. You must first use these devices to connect with your Tablo in the same local network. Once this is done, then they are "paired" with your unit so that remote viewing is available. When setting up remote viewing, you can specify the bit rate for this feature. If you want to conserve your cell bandwidth and don't care that much about picture quality, you can go as low as 500kbps. For better remote HD quality, you can set it higher.* You can also adjust recording and live viewing bandwidth in your local network. I find that 3 mbs produces fine quality HD, but you can go higher if you want. The bitrate for recording will affect the number of hours of recordings on your hard disk. Picture quality is very good for my needs. Yes, the units compress the video. A purist might want to split the antenna signal and watch the OTA directly with the TV's tuner if that's an issue.* Dual tuners let you watch or record two different channels (on different TVs) or watch one channel while recording another, etc. In our household, there's only 2 of us, so the dual tuner model is fine. A larger family might want the 4 tuner model. Actually, in our set-up, we have a dual tuner in Florida and a dual tuner in our primary residence, and can access either Tablo from the other location so technically we have four tuners!* You can watch a recorded program while recording two other programs with the DVR.* I prefer the Tablo Preview app to the standard Tablo app. On the Fire Stick, it loads instantly and there's no waiting for "sync." The standard app takes a while to sync up if you've just started up.Some other things you should know. We pay $49.99/year for the program guide. I think this is a pretty good deal since this also activates the automatic commercial skip feature, remote access, and 14-day guide. It's possible to operate without the paid service, but you can only schedule 24 hours in advance, or record via tuner/timer settings. I don't mind paying for the guide, especially since it helps keep Tablo profitable and around. (My previous DVR was a "Simple TV" brand that was similar to the Tablo. However, when that company closed its doors, my unit became useless. My recommendation is to buy from a company that's going to be around and provide ongoing support. A modest payment doesn't hurt.)The tuners in my two Tablo Dual devices are pretty good. They pick up channels that, in some cases, don't scan on my TVs. A minor complaint is that they only show the virtual channel number, not the actual RF channel. So when WNBC-4 is transmitting on RF channel 36, it's cataloged as CH4. The geek in me would prefer to show both the actual channel and virtual channel. Without that information you don't really know if you are receiving VHF or UHF frequencies, which require different types of antennas. This unit does not support cable QAM channels. Strictly over the air television.As far as I can tell, the main difference between the Dual 64 and Dual Lite is the 64GB internal storage. You can always increase the storage on the 64 by adding a hard disk, but I've never come close to filling it up since I regularly delete the programs I've watched. I would have purchased a 2nd 64, but the price on the Lite was much more attractive. I also noticed that my Dual 64 is manufactured in Canada while the Dual Lite is from China. The units appear physically the same but the Dual Lite requires a 1.5 amp power supply, while the 64 requires a 1.0 amp supply. Each unit is shipped with an AC adapter.

I purchased this in Jan 2019 and installed in March 2019 after installing the attic antenna. It has never worked reliably for me even though a neighbor close by has had success with a quad Tablo unit. The main issue is the Tablo unit would constantly go "offline" requiring a manual reboot (usually remove the power cord for a few seconds and plug back in). There is no message or blinking light or any other way to determine it went offline until you want to use the device or the app to watch a live program or a scheduled recording. I missed many scheduled programs because of this unreliability (and a very unhappy spouse missing This is Us recordings). In addition, if away on vacation, there is no way to remotely reboot this unit. I would know it went offline (1000 miles away) because I could not longer log into the device, but could do nothing about it until I returned home. Not a good design.More specific details. Soon after installation I started having this device offline issue. After some further research (online and talking to the neighbor) I upgraded to the antenna to ANTOP AT-415B (which the neighbor recommended and uses for his Tablo OTA unit - which does not go offline for the same OTA channels). I still ran into the same offline issues and reached out to Tech support in July.For a period of two months we tried to work through what was wrong. I tried various options they suggested. Since the support is only a day time (9-5) support at times they could not get into the unit because it had already gone offline by the time I executed their commands the night before for remote access and the point in time hey tried to remotely log into the device to respond to my emails with the latest changes I had performed. When they did connect they recommended deleting channel that only they could tell me did not have good reception even though I have 5 green lights showing on my app for the specific channel(s). At times I would go for a little longer period of time but ultimately would have the same offline status when I tried to watch a program. I changed cables, tried with and without line amplification, in addition to getting a more powerful antenna. Ultimately I would get the same result. By the way, they never suggested that their physical unit might be bad. The bottom line message, if you have channels that might not always get good reception, it forces the device offline - not a good design in my opinion. Since I have to rely completely on their “expertise” I am finally at the point that I have to abandon this investment and not recommended it.