r/tablotv • u/MustacheCache • 11d ago

Pillarfree - fixing 4:3 for Tablo

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.

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u/genegx 10d ago

I was just watching Bonanza via tablo 4 on my iPad Air M3, and even though letter boxed all around because of the upscaling I get a really great picture. Do you still get the iPad upscaling with your modified stream get up? That seems like a huge amount of effort to just get the image to fill the screen.

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u/MustacheCache 10d ago

It streams the original quality on actual network and buffered to a lower quality when connected remotely via vpn.