Consistently Bad Tuner (1 out of 4 tuner with issues)

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Has anyone had any experience with a bad tuner on the four tuner model? I’ve contacted Tablo twice where they remote in and say nothing is wrong but it has never worked right for over a year. I even tried resetting the tablo, formatting the usb, and replacing the usb with a different model. It is not a reception issue and instead it is a problem with the 2nd tuner. Whenever I go to the 2nd tuner the bottom half of the screen distorts and I’ve noticed the distortion sometimes has part of the image from the first tuner. It isn’t my device since I’ve duplicated it on ipads, windows 10 laptop with chrome, windows 10 desktop with chrome, roku 3, roku 4, amazon fire stick, nvidia shield tv, lg g3, iphone 6, and iphone 7. Even wired it does the same thing. Rebooting makes no difference on the tablo.

So here’s an example.

I pick fox 4 - perfect picutre (tuner 1)
I next pick cbs 5 - distorted bottom picture (tuner 2)
I next pick abc 9 - perfect picture (tuner 3)
I next pick cw 29 - perfect picture (tuner 4)
I next pick 38 - perfect picture (tuner 1)
I next pick ion 40 - distorted bottom picture (tuner 2)
I next pick cbs 5 - perfect picture (tuner 3) This was distorted back when tuner 2 was used.
I next pick 62 - perfect picture (tuner 4)
I next pick fox 4 - perfect picture (tuner 1)
I next pick abc 9 - distorted bottom picture (tuner 2) This was working on tuner 3 above

I tried eliminating any amps. I’ve tried splitting the signal 3 times before going to the tablo. I’ve tried two different amps and 2/3 splits. Doesn’t make a difference splitting or adding amps and I have a roof mounted antenna with less than 20 miles from the towers (slight hills between towers. Not enough to destroy signals but we don’t have signals so intense a paperclip can get them) Using tvs with the same split as the ablo I am roughly in the 78-90 reception strength on all channels on the lg tv in the same room as the tablo.

I’ve asked if the tuner 2 can be disabled as that would fix everything but no one has offered to do that for me. Very annoying. You can’t watch a channel and record at once since the recordings are always garbled at the bottom due to the tuner glitch. You can’t record two programs at once either since one recording is always messed up unless you proactively start flipping through channels 10 minutes before the times start. We are watching Hulu 95% of the time as a dvr. As a whole home one person watching tv it works but as a dvr it is MAJOR problem.

I’ve tried turning off for a week the fast startup. I tried tuning on fast startup for a week. Each day I tried different resolution bitrates to see if anything changes. 720p 3mb is a little faster performance wise but nothing between low to high in bitrate makes any difference on the 2nd tuner issue.

I swear there are times I want to break this thing open and rip out the 2nd tuner but my luck it bricks it because it can’t find tuner 2 or if I opted to move the parts from tuner 4 to tuner 2 with my soldering skills. I wish we had more options in this box to change the tuner order or disable a tuner in the dvr.

2

How are you determining what tuner it is? I just noticed this happening on my 2 tuner unit that I purchased only last week and is updated to the latest firmware. However, my issue is a bit different as I’ve noticed it only happens with remote streaming and it isn’t the entire bottom half of the picture, it’s only about the bottom fifth. If I’m watching it on my home network, everything is fine. It happens with all channels regardless of what the remote streaming bandwidth is set to. To be clear, I’ve only tested the remote streaming over the AT&T LTE mobile network to my iPhone and iPad, also running the latest versions of the app. I’ve got a strong signal on both devices. This has only been occurring the last few days and it didn’t occur the first few I had the Tablo. Hope I can get this resolved, because I primarily will be using the Tablo for remote streaming.

3

That’s odd… usually when “Remote Streaming Quality” under Tablo’s Settings is set to “2Mbps or Full Quality” it fixes the problem for me… Is your Internet Service Provider have a good upload speed?

4

Hey mate, is this the problem you are seeing? Banding at bottom of screen when remote viewing

5

Have very fast upload speed, right around 100 Mbps.

6

Yes, that is exactly the problem I’m seeing.

7

Upload speed has absolutely NOTHING to do with your LAN speed and coverage. Keep searching the community and you will find your answer. Cheers!

1 Like
8

Are you only experiencing this problem remote viewing (aka via Tablo Connect)? Or is it with local viewing (aka while on your home network)?

9

For me it is all local and I am using a netgear r6300 with gigabit ethernet ports, I have a wireless n network aswell as a second that is ac and g combined. On the wireless I can go as high as 500/1300mb if the device supports it not that tablo should be pushing out that amount of mbs. I haven’t tried it recently remotely since they blocked the ports now at work. I saw that banding picture and mine is a bit different. It is the bottom 1/5 of the screen that is garbled. I swear part of the image is both from tuner 2 and tuner 1.

10

The 2nd tuner might be stuck in a bad state.
Try briefly pressing the Tablo reset button, which will reboot it.

Follow the steps you did previously.
Does the 2nd tuner still misbehave?

11

No improvement. I thought I had done that but after all my testing you start to question when you did it last. Did the reset buttn reboot yesterday. Been playing with the bitrates again but no changes.

12