I have a 4-tuner 4th gen streaming to a Nvidia Shield Pro. All software and firmware is up-to-date.
Almost every time I wake the Shield and open the Tablo app, I’m met with this blue screen (or a similar message just along the bottom. telling me to call support). The good news is that if I click on Disconnect, the app will automatically restart and reconnect. So why not just reconnect silently, without throwing up the error message and requiring user input?
I’m not completely sure, but I think this happens whenever I put the Shield to sleep while watching a recording or live TV, and I have to let the device sleep a while. If I wake it within a minute, the Tablo app is fine.
Every app needs to take care of itself when the OS puts the device to sleep. The app should handle this gracefully, and not crash every time.
And that’s what most consumers are expecting with these “always on” devices. I don’t worry about manually saving and closing all my apps every time I put my phone in my pocket. And I shouldn’t have to babysit Tablo when I turn my TV off.
The app didn’t crash. If it had there would be no tablo message on the screen. If you turn off the sleep timer does the message go away. And does your phone actually go to sleep or into screen saver mode.
Plain and simple, the Android/Fire version of the app does not like being left open if you’re not watching. Especially if your device goes to sleep. Most of the time, it’s just the blue screen and a spinning white circle. Pressing the back button will get me back in, but sometimes there is the part where it says it could not find the Tablo – different sleep settings on different devices. Some turn the network off, so there’s no way to keep connected to the Tablo unless you keep your connection going. My guess would be that waking the device back up, the network’s in a state of flux, so the app needs to be refreshed somehow so that it knows that there’s a connection there.
So, if you know you’re going to be shutting off your TV, just back out of the app until you exit. It only takes a few seconds, but the app loads great from this state.
When you put your phone in your pocket, the phone goes into a standby mode but in that situation you have already stopped using almost all apps and so for all intense purposes the apps are idle and can sleep/standby with no concern of lost communication or information.
Hope the following helps make it a little clearer:
Example: If you make a request on a phone app to your bank but either shut it off or put the phone in your pocket into standby/sleep before the bank server receives, processes your transaction and returns the success or failure and gets/gives the confirmation results, even those apps would return a failed result when you open them the next time because the server would be concerned about the lost communication and waiting for confirmation from your phone app having submitted the request that it was successfully received or failed.
With Tablo, there is two way constant communications going on between the open app and the device with the guide, ongoing OTA video communication, recordings results, etc. Without properly closing the app the device suddenly loses its ability to communicate with what it still thinks should be a up and running working app so after probably a number of attempts and a certain amount of time, the device stops trying to speak/communication with the app but record the failure so when you start the phone back up and open the app the Tablo device probably determines the last thing it was doing had failed to get properly sent/received by the app and so it’s giving you that to inform you that a failure occurred and if it continues to happen while you have the app open and running then this might be a sign of a more serious issue, otherwise it just informational.
Maybe Tablo could handle that communication disruption in a more appealing way but that is extremely difficult when there is two way constant communication and you suddenly turn off one end of the communication abruptly without proper notification and sleep mode is not a graceful shutdown signal that’s why you can’t do sleep mode when certain activities are in progress. ie. updates to your device OS.
Might not be what you want to hear but it’s just my thoughts.
I have this issue on my Android phone whenever I do a firmware update on it and then just put it in pocket as it starts the process. I may look at it 15 minutes later, and it will have that message. It’s not a big deal, as I can close the app and re-open it to get it working.
