Another quick update regarding the ‘loading - please wait’ issue as seen on Roku 3…
We believe we have tracked down the source of the frequent ‘loading please wait’ messages on Roku 3 devices. Our testing shows that when Roku 3 units are hardwired (using Ethernet) with a Tablo set at the 1080 – 10 Mbps recording quality, that the Roku’s Ethernet driver may become overwhelmed causing some packets to be lost.
As users have seen, this can occur multiple times during a single recording playback instance. The same video plays fine on all other Tablo apps on all other devices. With the Roku 3, when the overload occurs, it appears to take up to 20 seconds or so to resolve, which the user experiences as the infamous ‘Loading – please wait’.
This issue became problematic in firmware after 2.2.2 because previous firmware used a different kernel which appears to recover from the error much faster, thus obscuring the problem.
We do plan to work on finding a firmware workaround for the Roku’s Ethernet behavior, but in the meantime, decreasing the Tablo’s recording quality to 1080 – 8 Mbps seems to eliminate the majority of these instances on good quality networks.
Please note that we have specifically used Roku 3 in identifying this issue. Older Roku 2 models do not have Ethernet connections so should not be affected by this. We will be working to test newer Roku 2 models that do have Ethernet connections to see if we are able to reproduce this same state.