I’ve had a Tablo for over a year, and it works great on the iPad and Amazon Fire Stick on the home network, and passably well on the iPhone and iPod Touch as long as we’re in the home network. When I try to stream using an iPhone on cell service or an iPod Touch on either a hotspot or outside WiFi network, there are all kinds of problems. They’ve changed with different updates, but these are a few of the things still happen in my iPhone 6s. Does anyone else have similar experiences and/or workarounds?
The first time you try to watch a recording, even if you’re most of the way through it on the home network, it streams it “live” from the beginning.
During this “live” stream it seems to download the entire program ahead of the view, so you can jump forward eventually. However, it sucks up massive cell data during this time.
If you stop watching, it will forget your place and start from the beginning every time.
However, it won’t re-download the entire recording again, unless you close the app (although this seems inconsistent).
It’ll often freeze and crash, which then sends you back to the beginning and live streaming. Once this happens, it’ll usually crash again at the same location on the recording.
If that happens, that one recording won’t play again reliably, and you have to leave the app, restart, and pick something else to watch. This will remain unwatchable until you go to the home network, where it may start at the beginning or may resume at the last place you watched on that home network. It will not remember your cell/outside location. Sometimes it may still crash when you get to that cell crash spot, though.
Sometimes it’ll decide to show a prior show instead, and you have to delete it to force the app to display the recording you’ve selected instead.
I can’t access it easily right now, but it’s one of the faster FIOS plans and the upload speed is way higher than any of the Tablo stream bitrate settings I’ve used (I’ve tried several of them.) Which makes sense, since I can watch the recorded show “live” while seeing the length of it go from a few minutes to a full hour on the progress bar above.
Most of my testing was at 1 M speed, I went to 750 to try to help it. I did try faster speeds too, but not since the latest Tablo updates. I’ll try later today.
Is your mobile strong LTE? There can be weirdnesses with mobile data. I’ve got T-Mobile and for a while I think the “binge” thing messed with me? Although I was unlimited it somehow automatically added me to that feature. Once I realized that, I opted out of “binge” and everything usually works fairly well.
But, it is mobile data and iPhone is buggy enough app, so…
So, an interesting development. I tested the LTE transfer speeds and they were very good - 2.4 mb/s on my cellphone. However, when I tested the home internet speeds they were MUCH worse than the 75/75 that I’m paying for, varying wildly and in one test only uploading at 240kb/s. Verizon told me that the router that they supplied me with and that I am required to use is the problem - but I can buy or rent a different model that will actually work. So I’m hoping that this is the root of my Tablo problems… we’ll see in a week, when I receive the router I was forced to buy (what a scam!) Will retest and update this post at that time.