Cannot record Olympic Games

Tried to schedule recording several Olympic events, all of them never started. Other programs were recorded as usual. Is these some sort of protection that prevents recording? No conflicts or warning were generated at all.

Humm… That is an unusual problem.
I’ve been able to record various Olympic programs.

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Hi there @olebon Sorry you missed a few events. There is no prohibition or protection for the Olympics.

Sometimes if you schedule individual sporting events well in advance (versus by series/sport) the guide data can change/be updated closer to the airtime which can unfortunately sometimes unschedule the airing.

If there were an error with your recording storage or a lack of signal at the time of the airing, you would have seen that reflected as a failed recording.

I missed the Opening Ceremony and around 3 other Olympic recordings because of week signal. I decided to do a rescan of my channels and sure enough NBC had changed frequencies and now its recording great again.

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Olympic recording works on my device. It just that the program may be 5 hours long but after 5 minutes recording, if the signal becomes weak, I see a message of cannot record due to weak signal. The other few hours of the event, even when the video quality is fine, It seems to not bother to try and record the event so I have to watch the rest of that program live if I want to. I think rebooting it may triggers the recording attempt again, but I didn’t bother. It’s like setting it to record the 3-hour program and waking up watching 5 minutes of the event.

We have experienced this, too. Anything set up to record more than a few hours ahead of time seems to be at high risk of not recording. The general “Tokyo Olympics 2020” grouping in the sports section recorded very inconsistently. Even navigating the programming grid 24 or 48 hours in advance and marking each instance to record has been hit or miss.

Sounds like it’s a known issue based on @TabloTV 's explanation, but it’d be nice to have a fix that makes the recordings more resilient to these changes. I’d rather have recordings of irrelevant things because the schedule changes than have the recording not happen because something gets tweaked in the guide data after I hit the “record all” button.

I also experienced this issue recording Olympics events. I actually need to check each recording a few minutes before starting to verify it will record. It seems to miss about 50%. Hope Tablo can fix this issue.

This could be an issue with highly dynamic guide data. Not sure what the good answer is other than to change to a manual recording.

The answer is probably the same today as it was 5 years ago.

Not evebrything listed as live is acually new. Some are composites of various events. Some may or may not have parts previously shown.

I had to turn on record all and turn off no dups. Then for the first 24 hours manually mark all the programming not already checked for record. Since then I haven’t missed a recording. I just have to FF through what I’ve already seen.

This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but in my location (~50 miles from Houston) the NBC signal was weakened on the day the Olympic games started. Now the picture stalls every 2-3 minutes, something that never happened before. As a result my Tablo could not record a single event. A likely reason may be either some new construction obscuring the view or deliberate signal level reduction. All other 90 channels are as good as before.

I’m 34 miles from the NBC tower. I’d been thinking about getting a Tablo for a year or more. I’ve switched streaming services a few times looking for the right mix. (I miss Playstation Vue.) Just before the Olympics started, I installed an Antennas Direct - ClearStream 4MAX in the attic under a tile roof and it works well. I set all NBC Olympic sessions to be recorded and as far as I know, it worked. The only issue I had was the dreaded “cannot record due to weak signal” on 4 or 5 of the multitude of sessions. I know the signal gets weak momentarily from time to time, so let me join the others asking for a remedy. Maybe an option to ignore weak signals and record anyway or an automatic retry a number of times after a minute or so. Please, Tablo. I’ll give you until the 2022 Winter Olympics. :slight_smile:

I am a firmware/software coder myself and I am100% sure that the task of skipping bad frames should not be a challenge for an average programmer. For example HDHomeRun does not even bother with low signal, they record everything as is. I switched to Tablo from them and this is the first only case when I feel like HomeRun is better.

I had a connect duo and now a 4k. They don’t act any different then tablo. If it can’t lock onto the signal it just pops out of trying. You can also scan the channels and immediately try to play some that it says are good but you know are at the fringe and guess what - they won’t play.

My tablo does perform retries but only if it can lock on some amount of signal. It’s not going to record a phantom signal.

I have Clearstream 2v and 4v, and while the 4 max is a good antenna it doesn’t come with a reflector like the 2v/4v. It’s an add-on. And while 34 miles may seem close it depends on whether it’s a full powered VHF or UHF signal. Plus you also have to reduce the distance capabilities based on an attic mount inside a tile roof.

I have at times, had programs that were broken up into several small clips because of a varying weak signal. The clips might be <1 minute to several minutes each. Those clips usually contained a lot of pixelization and may not be watchable. Fortunately I haven’t had any weak signal problems in quite some time, so I don’t know if the latest Tablo firmware still performs this in this manner.

Not knowing what tuner chipset(s) the Tablo hardware uses, skipping bad frames could be a problem if there is not any framing signal coming from the tuner chipset to trigger on.
I worked with some Hauppauge TV Tuner cards 10-12 years ago. If they were not receiving a valid signal, there were no frames to read from the card.

As it turned out for me, I recorded 90+ hours of the Olympics. Instead of using the setting “Record New” or “Record Live”, I used “Record All”. Got far more Olympics than I bargained for.

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