Well I am continuing to build and test what I need to cut the cord with cable. Last time I talked about Plex and how I was using it to test my antenna and store all our DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s. Now I’ve picked up the Tablo 4-tuner OTA DVR. I decided on the 4-tuner rather than the 2-tuner since there are times that what we would be watching on our two TV’s and also might be recording so that the 2-tuner version might cause conflicts for us. The Tablo DVR’s do not include their own hard drive to store your recordings, so you have to buy one separately and connect it to the Tablo’s USB port. I picked up a Seagate Expansion 3TB external drive. This will give me a ton of space to store any recordings without having to worry about losing shows we haven’t watched yet.
The Tablo is a whole home DVR. It connects to your antenna to get the TV signals and then can either record the show to the hard drive or stream the show to a smart TV or streaming device that has the Tablo app. Set up was pretty straight forward. I did have to reboot the device after initial set up to get it to use the hard drive for recordings, but after that everything has been smooth. It has a traditional grid view for selecting shows to watch or record and it also allows for viewing the guide on a show by show basis. Both our smart TV’s have the Tablo app so I was able to test it with our TV’s without having to get a streaming box. It has been working well.
We will still need to get a Roku streaming device since neither smart TV has apps for the popular streaming services like Sling TV, DirecTV Now, or Playstation Vue. (Actually that is not quite true anymore, our Samsung TV in the bedroom just added the Sling TV app. But our Vizio in the living room still does not have it.)
I’ve also decided to switch to Vonage for our landline service. I can get very comparable service to what we have now and save about $10 a month. That more than pays for one Roku box.
Things are still looking good for cutting the cord soon. I’ll get the next few pieces soon and see how they work.
Luhman-ations 