Clicking through commercials with Roku

General Discussion
1

I’ve found that when I click through commercials using Roku on a DVR’d show, I have one of 2 experiences:

  1. I see a series of thumbnails as I click through commercials, one per click. So I know just when to stop clicking, since I can see when the show starts. Very quick to do, precisely landing on the start of the next show segment.

  2. I see no thumbnails as I click through the commercials, just a timeline. I have to stop every couple of clicks to see if I’ve gotten to the beginning of the next show segment. This is time consuming and annoying.

So my question is how do I get experience #1. above to be the rule rather than the exception? Seems like this should be deterministic, and that I should be able to get the Tablo (and/or the app) to work this way all the time. But I have no idea what determines which way that this goes.

Does anyone have any experience with getting this to work with thumbnails all the time?

Thanks!

2

If you are using an older or under powered roku model, things started to go downhill with roku os 11. and roku os 12 didn’t make it any better - worse.

FF and single step work fine on my 4660 ultra. Not on my 4200 and 4210. They use different OS 12 versions.

But CS seems to work better since it was kind of sickly on older models.

3

Lesser, but supported models. Would seem that the old days of Tablo are gone. Future unknown.

4

Interesting…under powered? Everything else works like a Roku should with this one…Weird. I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m not seeing where power plays a big role in this. Pretty static, actually. And it seems to me that a Roku should either do it or not do it, not do it sometimes and not other times.

Could be the Tablo app somehow, I suppose…

Okay, thanks, appreciate it.

5

Tablo doesn’t supply the video player. FF probably falls under control of roku video player trick mode

The older models use roku os 12.0.0 4184-04. The newer models use roku os 12.0.0 4184-46.

The there are other OTT products that have had FF playback issues based on the roku os version. Some OTT DVR content might partially work. Other tines it wouldn’t

6

I’ve noticed that it does the “no thumbnails” thing when the show is recording as well as being played back. Then, if I go forward to get through commercials, I get the timeline, no thumbnails, and “Rewinding Live TV” in the lower left hand corner of the screen. Even though the part that I’m watching isn’t live (and I’m going forward not rewinding), it’s already been recorded.

It may simply be that while a show is being recorded that thumbnails aren’t available. I’m not sure why that would be, since the model in my head is that the recording is simply a file on a disk that can be written to or read as needed. I guess that must not be right :-).

7

That’s exactly the problem. Tablo has to generate the thumbnails after the program has completed. It can take a bit of time for it to do this so it’s not available immediately after the recording is finished.

8

I got similar replies to what you said when I posted a similar question…

9

I think tablo uses HLS and the HLS video player that comes on most devices. And could thumbnails need to be in a compliant file that is referenced in the HLS manifest file when trick play is enabled.

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