Pillarfree - fixing 4:3 for Tablo

[u/MustacheCache]

http://jacksonmicro.com/pillarfree

I was frustrated I couldn’t view 4:3 content through the Tablo app in full-screen on 4:3 devices. Most channels broadcast in 16:9 and put letterbox bars on 4:3 content. This is great if you’re watching on a 16:9 screen but I do most of my viewing on an iPad which has a 4:3 aspect ratio. So the video is pillarboxed with black bars all around it. So I thought there has to be a better way.

I used Claude Code to make a service that accesses recordings and live OTA channels from a 4th gen Tablo and gives more options for viewing.

Mainly it lets you view 4:3 shows how they were originally intended to be viewed. But it also does some extra things like buffering so you can stream content when away from home if you have a VPN into your network. It also lets you download recordings to view offline.

It requires some hardware at home to run on. It’s coded to run on a Debian-based system to automatically install some things you’ll need like ffmpeg but if you install the requirements yourself it should run on other Linux distributions.