Roku legacy products

[BriGood]

I am testing cord-cutting options to reduce the expense of Xfinity/Cable TV/Tivo on our home LAN and 2 Vizio TVs. 

With an OTA antenna we get around 60 TV stations through 50 year old legacy CATV coax, which is OK for the major networks and local channels.  With the Tablo 4th Gen 4-tuner and Roku Express 4K+ remote I bought for testing, we actually get a few more OTA stations and a mind-boggling array of streaming options over the LAN.  But unfortunately when I installed the Roku Express 4K+, it defaulted to a WiFi connection because the cheapie ethernet-usb adapter I picked up on eBay didn't pass through power to the Roku.

Probably due to the WiFi connection. the Roku Express 4K+performance was sluggish in terms of buffering and channel changing.  I've since received an approved ethernet-usb adapter which should enable the Roku to connect via wired ethernet and be considerably faster.

I'm wondering if upgrading from the Roku Express 4K+ to one of the Roku Ultra models will provide better performance, and which Roku Ultra model to look at?  Tablo customer support recently suggested that the Roku Ultra 4660 and 4670 series models work best with the Tablo 4th Gen DVR, noting problems with the 4800 series which still have work-arounds.

So will wired ethernet performance be materially improved by upgrading to Roku's Ultra series, and should I wait for Tablo's fix for the 4800 series or try and pick up legacy 4660 or 4670 Roku Ultra model on eBay?

Thanks for any guidance. 

[BriGood]

After connecting the upgraded ethernet-usb adapter with POE power injection, the Express 4K+ immediately recognized the wired ethernet connection and the UI seems to be quite a bit snappier.

But my initial question remains - would an upgrade to Roku Ultra noticeably improve performance? 

Thanks.

[renojim · Accepted solution]

I'm going to say, "no".  I just tried comparing my Ultra 4800 (which I believe is identical to the current 4802 except for the remote) to my old 3920 that's probably slower than your Express.  The Ultra and the Tablo are connected to the same Ethernet switch and the 3920 which has always had a marginal Wi-Fi receiver is connected to a 2.4GHz channel.  If anything, the 3920 is faster at changing channels.  I can't explain it and going from one channel to another takes a varying amount of time, but the 3920 is more often faster.

By the way, I don't know exactly where this question belongs, but you might get better visibility and more responses in another section of the "Community" like the Channels & Viewing section.

[BriGood]

Thanks for the feedback, renojim. 

Based on my limited first-hand experience, my only conclusion is that the wired 3920 connection is faster than WiFi (Duh!) from a 100MB fast ethernet segment of my LAN.  Roku's speed test reported 89mb/s which sounds about right. 

So maybe buying an Ultra for my 2nd TV may not be worthwhile.  My primary interest is in recording OTA from the local antenna channels, where I am noticing frequent pixelization just in the evening news programs.  Maybe Channels and Viewing can give me some leads for that.

[andyross]

For questions on what devices work with Tablo devices, check out the Tablo community.

https://community.tablotv.com/