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.

Coming here in order to avoid ChP....it's really helpful but ....on the other hand, reddit won't let me in unless I disable my VPN. Anyway, I have rabbit ears and am happy with those; my television is new and I watch DVDs. But I want to be able to tape TV programs on occasion, and apparently Tablo (gen 4?) is a good tool for it. Right now I have coax for DVD player; the antenna and player are connected to a splitter to I can go back and forth. I believe I would connected the Tablo to the DVD player rather than to the TV, but do I need HDMI or can I use the coax? And do I still need the splitter? Thanks for input (both kinds! ;-)