I had a similar issue until I pulled the hard drive out. 3 programs in one night had audio and video separation, and it wasn’t the viewing device. Roku, Android, Google, Android mobile were all the same. One of them was so bad it wouldn’t play past 1:42.
How old is your external drive?
Hmm. It’s definitely a few years old. It’s a My Passport 2gb drive. But this seems to be a problem all over the live channels. The sound now seems to be working on all channels (not sure why it dropped out on some), but the lagging slow-mo video is definitely persistent across most live channels. I wouldn’t think the external storage HD would have any effect on that.
It’s using your external drive as a time shift and storing whatever’s playing on your screen onto your drive. This is why you can rewind up to the point where you began. (It acts as a cache point before it hits your screen.)
I’m going to go on a limb here and say that you fare better on 720 and 480 channels?
Not sure. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern. For major networks, some are fine, others are slow mo.
Mine were all major networks, all in 1080. It was definitely more of a problem if I was recording something else at the same time. Nothing I’d recorded in a lower dpi had this issue.
Just remember, if you pull out your drive, your Tablo won’t recognize it again… so don’t yank it willy-nilly!
Well, before you sent that reply, I unplugged the Tablo and pulled the HD. After rebooting nothing improved and it couldn’t find my recordings. Then I saw your email. I unplugged the Tablo and reconnected the HD. Fortunately, it would appear I can still access the files, but still no better playback.
Oh, and only recording/playing back on one device with no load on our AT&T fiber wifi network. So I don’t think there’s a problem there.
Oh crap!
I would definitely try recording something right away to see if it’s still recognizing your external. Maybe you caught it before it changed the database!
This is weird. Have you put in a support ticket or called Tablo regarding this issue?
I remember you having issues on other devices. Have you tried viewing on anything other that what you are now? (I’m sure I’m asking a stupid question, sorry!)
I hate to ask, but what about a direct connection to a TV – either at the same time, or just to test?
Well, shit. Nope. Won’t record. I guess that means I have to reformat and lose all of my recordings now. Sigh. UPDATE: It looks like I did catch it. It is recording new shows. So that’s one crisis averted.
No, I have not submitted a ticket to Tablo.
I have tried viewing on my basement projector with a Chromecast. But only once. It seemed fine. I’ll check again now.
How would a direct connection even work? And FWIW, the whole reason (well, one of several) we bought a Tablo was to untether our TV from the antenna. The TV is on the opposite side of the room from the antenna wire, Tablo, and Cat 6 line to the router/modem.
Oh, good! I’d hit the reboot button on the puck just to make sure this is still going to continue and not just be a one off. How is playback of old recordings?
(written earlier before editing for your surprise recording):
If you have to wipe the drive anyway, I would take a couple days and see how the internal drive handles it. If it’s still like that no matter what, then for sure, something is wrong with your Tablo.
I hope you don’t have a lot of recordings on there. There is a way to at least copy them with linux, but it’s a bit of a hassle.
I get the need to have the Tablo in a different room. My living room is an interior wall and mountains to the other side! I meant sticking the antenna straight onto your TV to see if those stations are causing a problem that way.
I really feel for you. I would be going nuts!
Well, I used to use a Magnavox DVD/DVR and stations played/recorded fine on it. My wife is very non-plussed with my “upgrade” at this point. I haven’t tried since purchasing the Tablo, but I wouldn’t expect it to have changed in the past few weeks. ASAP I will pull the drive/reformat and see if that fixes it. Not really looking forward to setting it all up all over again, but my wife doesn’t have too much stuff stored up yet on the HD.
LOL.
TWICE I wrote a paragraph about my NBC station causing issues with my Magnavox DVD-R OTA recorder but didn’t want to overwhelm you with information. IDK what the issue was, but everything recorded on NBC was terrible the last year or so. All I can assume is they did some upgrade (likely from 720 to 1080) and the machine hated it. I had video/audio splits from that point on, but only on that station. It was actually the reason I picked up my first PVR (which never had an issue w/ that channel)! My Philips stopped receiving digital stations a couple years ago and about 5 months ago the Magnavox’s DVD drive finally gave out. Started looking for different options. I hope it’s not an issue with the tuner – that was another thing I wrote and erased.
My thoughts (again, I’m no one special): Watch everything you can that’s already recorded so you can pull out the drive, reboot it (this is needed so that Tablo knows to record onto the internal again), and let that go for a few days. It won’t hurt anything by letting it record onto the internal disk, and putting the old one back in right away may only cause you more frustration. It’s important to know if this is a Tablo issue or a hard drive issue. Only by using the internal drive for a few days will you be able to find out. If you put the drive back in and haven’t spent much time testing other recording methods, Tablo will always assume it’s your external. Not to mention all the self-torture by continually going through the reformat process and having similar results.
I wish you luck. My issues cleared up after the removal, reboot, and letting internal take over. I’m in preparation to give this to my Mom in a couple days if my 4-tuner ever gets here (supposed to be here a week ago!)
Do me a favor though, slow down and try not to get too excited or pissed off. I don’t want anything making the situation worse or you finding yourself into a situation you can’t reverse! If your DVD-RW has a pass-through, maybe it’s worth doubling up on recordings just for a few days to see any differences. (The Tablo might need to have the amplification ON to overcome the pass-through.)
I hope your wife stays patient as you help get your “upgrade” settled to the point of full functionality. I really feel for ya. IDK what to do about an external since this last one didn’t work very well for me. :-/.
Thank you for all of the good advice. I think my first thing to check is my projector/chromecast setup to see if that is playing back content/live tv correctly. If it is, that will tell me it is likely something with the Onn box/TV. Then, if the Tablo seems to be at fault, I’ll pull the HD and start to follow your testing sequence.
I realize these fourth-gen Tablos are newish, but it just feels like I’m doing nothing special, and this should work out of the box way better than it has for me. Maybe I’m just an edge case, but I don’t feel like there is anything unusual to my usage. In fact, it feels like my setup (other than maybe an older HD) should be optimal for a Tablo. And even my HD seems like it should be way more than I need. I use to watch movies off of it all the time at full 1080p with no issues at all. But if I can get it to work right, it is a huge step up from the old Magnavox DVR.
Keep testing, and OC, keep us posted!
The plot thickens!
So, I have a basement projector/home theater setup which includes CCwGTV. I tried playing content that played extremely poorly on the other TV and it played fine on the projector. I played live NBC and it played much better (though not great) on the projector. It would still buffer every few seconds, even after pausing to let it store up some of the live broadcast. ABC has played fine on both. CBS seemed to play pretty well also.
So… This seems to point at something other than the Tablo or the HD. My TV is 32" Samsung “smart” TV. It is nothing special. The Onn is routed through an aux HDMI-enabled receiver (so is the CCwGTV in the basement). My plan is to replace this setup with a Samsung Frame TV and soundbar as soon as finances allow. Could this receiver/TV setup be the problem?
I’m glad things are getting slowly better, but I’m still confused on how you determined it wasn’t the hard drive.
I got my 4-tuner today, and recording 8 and watching another I had zero problem. Back on the one with a drive inserted and I can’t even get through an episode of Jeopardy without constant buffering while it records two shows.
I now have two out of three on just flash memory and both of them run without any buffering, no matter what I throw at them. I’ve just tried this on two Rokus, one GoogleTV, and the Walmart onn without an issue (I’m not worried about the Firesticks.)
IDK what happens when you pull out the hard drive, and try to record without a reboot. Not sure where it would put the timeshift, and maybe because it didn’t get stored, it was only in RAM? These Tablos operate in mysterious ways. I can unplug one while watching a show and it’ll continue for over 30 seconds! When the servers went down I could continue watching, but if I exited the app I could not connect.
It sounds like you’re putting so much energy into this and it’s killing me to hear how nothing seems to help. You said that there wasn’t much on the drive, and I don’t want to keep pushing you toward that, but there should be no reason you’re having an issue on that many test devices! That’s a lot of work… wow!
I’m going to assume that the new Samsung you want to buy is going to have Tizen, and if it does, there’s no Tablo TV app for it yet. I hate to see you in the same boat, hoping that a new TV will fix your issues when you still might need a Roku or Firestick.
I wish you luck, but I’m out of ideas. :). I’m holding off on a new drive with my 4-tuner until I do a little more research. I’m tired of buffering and even though my drives aren’t that old, I’m going nuts because of it! TBH, Tablo had that “recommended HD” list, but for weeks it was a 404 error, so I haven’t looked in a while.
I just don’t want you to get so overwhelmed that you give up. I can’t imagine doing all that you’ve been doing just to try to get it to work.
Keep sharing your experience – I await every post!
Edit: I wish hadn’t had that much on my drive before deciding to switch back to internal. I had to copy over and merge over 200G of recordings! Thus, the hesitation about starting again with a new HDD or SSD.
I concluded it wasn’t the drive because I was playing stored episodes of my shows on the basement projector and they played fine. Last night I was trying to play them on the Onn stick/receiver/TV and the video moved in slow-mo. So I assumed that it must not be something with the playback device (Onn/reciever/TV), not the Tablo/connected HD. I thought it might be the receiver, so I plugged the Onn stick directly to the TV. No change. I suppose this weekend I’ll probably wipe it and try a clean reboot and start over… I also started a ticket with Tablo about it…
Sounds like you’re so dedicated at this point, nothing’s gonna stop you from making this work! lol. I don’t blame ya. I’m going to pick up a hard drive later tonight for my new 4-tuner and believe me, you’ll be one of the first to know if I start having problems again!
If you do end up pulling the hard drive this weekend, I hope you test the crap out of the internal. Max it the heck out! Just be sure to do that reboot after taking it out.
I also couldn’t figure out what was going wrong with my Chromecast with Google TV HD (non-4k). Certain channels with great antenna signal strength kept lagging. It seems they’re the ones in 1080i, though I haven’t tried all channels to be sure. The same channels work perfectly on my phone. And they also work perfectly on my fire stick 4k. Tablo indicated they thought my Tablo device didn’t have great signal strength. But I don’t see how that explains the phone and fire stick 4k working fine. So, it does seem to be the Chromecast HD app that’s sub-optimal or the hardware in the device isn’t up to the task. I’ll try moving the device closer to the router. But I don’t see how that’s going to solve anything…
Same conclusion I came to, the Chromecast HD is underpowered for the new Tablo, but the Chromecast 4K is fine.
So… Two things. I emailed Tablo support two weeks ago about all of this. Got a confirmation email that they would respond, then… crickets. I re-messaged yesterday. No reply.
BUT… inexplicably the recordings that were super laggy and experiencing video slow-mo just started working fine. I do not believe I installed an update (it does prompt you, right?), but now recordings made over a month ago are somehow working fine. Same with live TV. I have zero explanation as I have changed absolutely nothing in the past two weeks. I will soon be installing a Samsung “The Frame” TV, so hopefully it will work fine with streaming off of the Onn 4k box (like I’m doing now). Time will tell…