I got a Tablo DUAL LITE in May 2020, and for the first few months, it was great using it through the app on my LG SK8000 TV. I never figured out how to get the commercial skip to work but declined to purchase the subscription anyway, as I was happy to do it manually.
Lately, though, I’ve had serious frustrating issues with buffering. I can’t go more than one or a couple minutes (if that) without having 10 or so seconds of buffering. This has only started happening say within the last month or so and generally happens consistently, though some days/times are better than others. And to be clear, it’s buffering, not pixelating, as I understand the latter would likely be attributed to a bad TV antenna signal rather than WiFi signal.
From the beginning, my Tablo has been hard wired into my wireless router (a Netgear R6300v2), and my TV connects wirelessly to the router in the next room over. We have a strong WiFi signal in the room. (For fellow engineers: my phone’s WiFi analyzer shows a >-60 dBm signal in the 5.8 GHz band, about 20 dB more than any other signal. Additionally, the internet speed test on the same phone gave me >80 Mbps through said router.) I had no issues until now saving/streaming at the highest quality setting, though one of the first things I tried to troubleshoot this problem was to lower the recording/streaming quality, to no effect. I’ve also tried the usual things like power cycling, unplugging and reconnecting things, resetting, etc.
A few things I have no buffering issues with at all on the same TV include: streaming 4k video on Netflix, streaming 4k video on YouTube, streaming the same content on the Tablo app on my phone through a Chromecast plugged into the TV. So in my view there seems to be something specifically going wrong with the Tablo streaming through the LG TV. Any ideas what that might be or how I might fix it?
Is it just on recordings or is it happening on live TV too?
Have you tried removing the hard drive for a few minutes and trying to play back live TV? If it doesn’t buffer at all without the drive in, it could be going bad.
Thanks for your replies, and sorry for taking so long to follow up! As I said initially, it’s been an intermittent problem, and when it’s working, I’m not motivated to try to fix it (hopefully understandably). Lately it’s been working. Since I posted, I think the buffering problem has happened maybe 3 times.
The problem happens with both recordings and live TV. I also tried removing the hard drive and saw the same issue.
It’s a good suggestion to factory reset the TV, because I think all signs point to it. I was just unsure if it was something related to the Tablo App or the TV itself, though I’m now beginning to think its the latter and will explain why. I’ve had one other issue with this TV lately that I initially thought was unrelated: The WiFi connection will drop, and the settings will show that the WiFi is off, with no option to turn it on. It seems to be a problem with LG TVs. See, e.g.: https://lgcommunity.us.com/discussion/437/lg-smart-tv-wifi-wont-turn-on. In my case, unplugging and replugging the TV fixes the issue (for now).
A few days ago, I was getting buffering issues with the Tablo again after having no issues earlier that same day or over the last few days prior. So even though the TV was connected to the WiFi and could stream other content (YouTube, Netflix), I power cycled the TV just to see if it fixed the issues with the Tablo. And it did! I haven’t had any buffering issues since.
So my hypothesis is that the WiFi connection on the LG TV is a bit spotty. I’m not sure why the Tablo is more affected than other streaming services, but I’d say it’s more LG’s fault here than Tablo’s. Thanks for the help, and I hope this will help others that might have the same issue in the future.