# Tivo Edge OTA or Roku Ultra w/ Tablo DVR



## omelet1978 (Mar 7, 2006)

Hi,

I’m a long time Tivo user and unfortunately the place that I am moving to does not have Xfinity and has a contract for Directv only. With that being said I’m debating b/w a Tivo Edge or a Roku Ultra with a Tablo DVR. I currently have a 3TB Bolt that does not support an OTA antenna.

I already have the Roku Ultra and am leaning towards using that with the Tablo DVR rather than the Edge. I’m using Spotify more and am using other services like Disney+. I’ve also pulled all my movies off of the Tivo I have and put them onto a hard drive as MP4 videos and have plugged them into the Roku Ultra I have and can watch all of them just fine. 

That being said I’ve been with Tivo for a long time bc it’s the best DVR I’ve ever used, so if there is a good argument to use Tivo I’d love to hear it.


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## Fugacity (Oct 1, 2004)

I believe Tablo transcodes mpeg2 to H.264 before it stores it. Which is not ideal. In dealing with some OTA testing with an HDhomerun its way better for the TVs to handle the deinterlacing and most devices that take the streams take the OTA mpeg2 AC3 audio without transcoding so there is 0 loss of picture quality. The tivo also operates in this way. By the time you get an hdhomerun and something to run their dvr software and a place to store it or set up a plex server and get that and the guide working the tivo seems to be a way better option. In my opinion its still better to let the tv handle the deinterlacing from the tivo if possible and choose 720p/1080i resolutions in the tivo settings but I don't have an OTA tivo so I'm not sure if with a much better feed it matters. My cable company has a rather low (compared to OTA) bit rate and in my opinion on a 4k tv at least the tv does a better job at deinterlacing than the tivo. Devices like the table take this option from you in order to be able to store more recordings. Roku can't live stream TV from plex so with the hdhomerun you would have to use their app anyway to watch live TV and then it probably makes sense to use their dvr software..

Also the tablo appears to strip out surround sound audio or if you choose to keep it only send surround sound to the devices. some of which can't handle it and then you don't get audio.

https://support.tablotv.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001197843-5-1-Surround-Sound

You can certainly go through a lot of effort and make your own DVR ecosystem around roku devices though. But at the same time they aren't better than an OTA tivo and can be much more cumbersome and have less video quality.


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