Delving deeper into the Roku "Loading..Please Wait" issue

[quote=“RetiredEngineer, post:113, topic:4337, full:true”]
All 2500+ channels are viewed by people who skip content, go back to review content, pause then restart content after a bathroom break with a rewind or fast forward, etc. Sport fans will know this as would parents of kids with typical attention defecit button pushing. With over 13 million viewers on Roku and 2500+ channels, PLEASE SHOW ME THEIR FAST FORWARD REBOOT COMPLAINTS. Even if only one 100th of 1% of the users reported an issue,there should be tens of thousands between April and now.

Where are they?
[/quote]A typical hour broadcast has 18 minutes of commercials. The ffw button on roku moves 10 seconds a click. Are you really trying to tell me that users of 2500 roku channels click the ffw button 108 clicks every hour? How small is your bladder that you have to pause a program to pee 108 times an hour? Can you give me some examples of channels where ffw is used 108 times an hour? From the times i’ve seen it crash the roku, it was never ever on the first click. Or even the first several clicks. It’s caused when using the ffw button a lot more frequently than you use it on other channels. So infrequently on other channels that when it happens, you’re not likely to report it on a roku forum. I’ve had rokus since 2011 and they’ve crashed numerous times. But I didn’t even know there were roku forums until a few months ago. When i’ve gone to roku’s page for support, I don’t recall there even being a link to the forums. So, infrequent crashes combined with hidden forums equals not a lot of reports when there is a problem.

If I can make roku crash using other channels, would you blame the all the channels I can make crash? I stopped using my roku 4 because it kept crashing and I wasn’t even using the tablo channel on it.

Edit: I see the roku forums have 89,676 registered users. Pretty small sample size of 13 million users, wouldn’t you say? 0.6% of those users registered on those forums. And you’re basing conclusions off of how many bug reports you see there? Come on. You have to see how unscientific that is.

Complaints would show up not just on Roku’s forum but on EVERY forum where channel viewers congregate. When HBO Go had problems on AppleTV, we voiced our concerns on the HBO user community website.

Once again, can you show me evidence of other Roku channel users with reboots when navigating fast forward?

Obviously frequency of using fast forward and reverse directly correlates with probability this type of crash occurs, but other channels among the 2500 have higher frequency useage also. Hell, I can play and skip back and forth endlessly using the IDENTICAL RIPPED TABLO FILES played on the Roku PLEX channel and have never, ever seen a reboot ever.

Let’s see some other evidence of the other 13 million users and their fast forward crashes…your opinion is valued but actual proof would be really important to SHOW ACTUAL Roku users with this same problem.

By the way, if you think I have some blind-spot with Roku firmware, I will readily state that their firmware and quality assurance combined with the customer service is totally abysmal. I have numerous complaints, mostly firmware related, and think they are terrible to deal with and have very weak control both of their platform and especially of developer apps. Tablo has yet to impress me favorably in how they desl with their own Tablo issues, however, and my 1 year ownership has had, since day 1 last Novrmber 2014, missing recordings, icons which can not be deleted, differing recordings in one view compared to another, recordings appearing on iOS and Fire but missing on Roku, LPW buffer issues, connection issues, several sudden needs to do Tablo factory resets for no apparent reason, and even a dozen or more unplayable recordings showing up
for dates several months in the FUTURE which forced yet another factory reset. So they are both crummy hacks, yet Roku HAS, to its credit, done 5 firmware updates, none appearing to make things worse (with the possible exception of April 2015 V6.2 which may indeed be the actual true source of FFReboots). In the same time period of 1 year, Tablo has released pretty previews, but their channel app on Roku and firmware are MORE BUG FILLED now and still posess essentially the ssme problems they had a year ago. And they have offered ZERO evidence of providing any workaround to reduce, instrument, record, prevent, or otherwise mitigate their growing list of issues, essentially disowning, ignoring, and treating bugs as if their users were the cause. If I can watch and scrub 4K 100 Mbit/sec UHD video as well as Roku, AppleTV, DLNA, Seagate Home Theater HD+, SageTV HD, and sll other content with my router, switches, and CAT-6 cabling, I just do not want to hear about my network causing FFReboots.

Larry

That is odd because on August 25th you said

I agree entirely. My “5th month rant”, as I previously called it, has now ended. I look forward to the time when I will, just as I did in ny first ownership months 1-5 of Tablo, have zero complaints about Tablo and no need to post. Hopefully soon,

As can be seen Here

Guys. I think we agree that you disagree. Please retire to your corners. The fight has ended. If you want to continue it, please feel free to use the PM feature.

Very simple explanation. The first five months of ownership actually were not literally trouble free, and I will be glad to show / repost the actual posts and complaints which I posted then. Comparatively speaking, nooe of these complaints actually interrupted viewing by me or my wife since all of them impacted connecting, choosing, and starting only. Once viewing began, the Tablo viewing experience was altogether trouble and complaint free.

After the sudden firmware upgrade in month 5, however, the stuff hit the fan, and month 5 April until now the player experience totally stinks. Now both the non-viewing issues of connection, menu errors, missing files, etc. stay annoying but the REAL aggrevation of freezing and crashing is at a whole different level of problem now that freezes, reboots, and loading plesse wait have been the daily diet.

I have tried to provide a courteous and accurate reply to @philsoft in the spirit of being a mature adult. I will once again apologize to this forum if my remarks have appeared harsh, rude, ad hominem, or ill-spirited. I invite Phil to do the same.

Larry

On a more positive note, I received my new Apple TV today and I can’t wait to get home to test it.

My suggestion would be to stop caring about Roku because their product and support sucks and focus on making a really good apple tv app.

Oh btw you should also give discounts for lifetime subscription for all the trouble we had in the past months.

Thank you

My son is an AppleTV developer and has had a new unit since the September Apple Event. My use of it is extremely positive and it will eventually replace older ATVs here once the apps begin to show up.

Shame they didn’t include 4K UHD.

Totally agree about the subscription rebate.

Might try one on my home theater. I guess I should research it a bit, but I like surprises too much most of the time.

-Rodger

Last night I was trying to watch a F1 recording from last weekend. The LPW issue was so bad on my Roku, I gave up. Decided to try to watch on my tablet (Motorola Xyboard aka Xoom2) in bed, and that seem to have a lot of buffering issues. I then tried to watch it on my newer tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1) and that played much better.

It got me thinking about what I can do to make my media viewing experience less of a dice roll and just work smoother. Then I remembered the thread I saw about extracting the recordings off the Tablo and assembling them with ffmpeg. I think someone even had a python script to automate some of this. That got me thinking what if I just use the Tablo for recording (which it seems to do well as long as my antenna is connected right; it came loose a few times), transfer the content to my PLEX server and just watch it from my PLEX server with my Roku or Tablets? Watching off my PLEX server has never been an issue, perhaps partially due to the powerful hardware I have it running on. I may try later in the week to see if I can write a program to automate this… just trying to make lemonade out of lemons…

just sharing my thoughts with other folks who share the LPW issue and maybe also have a PLEX server around.

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Easy to say, but Roko has a much bigger market share than the Apple TV at present and I suspect represents the largest segment of the Tablo customer base.

I’d be happy for them to have a good Apple TV app as I have both platforms, but as the market stands today that would definitely limit their sales.

I bought 5 more Rokus once I saw how nicely Tablo playback looked, never expecting it to suddenly turn to crap after a firmware update last April. Am I supposed to start over and buy 7 AppleTVs?

And when the next firmware update kills AppleTVs Tablo channel playback, what then? Amazon Fires

This is already a reality for some of us. I use Tablo Ripper to automatically convert all of my recorded content into MP4. Those are automatically converted with MCEBuddy to remove commercials, separate subtitles from the stream into its own .srt file and separate .mp4 file. These are then automatically placed into my PLEX server which automatically finds all necessary metadata, cover art, and even subtitles/captions for some which might be missing. All I do is pick the shows/movies I want recorded and when I feel like it, I watch them on my PLEX sever either in my home theater or on any device I own, anywhere they are.

-Rodger

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For the past three years I’ve been using the Roku Media Player for playing shows and movies through the Roku. Prior to the Tablo, I would record OTA using my Hauppauge PC tuner, transcode the MPEGs to MP4s using Handbrake and have the Roku Media Player pick them up from the Windows Media service and play them from any one of my PCs. I had a script that picked up anything scheduled and recorded by the Hauppauge card.

These days I use the Tablo Ripper to get everything off the Tablo as soon as it is recorded and leave the job to display shows to the Roku Media Player. This way the drive attached to the Tablo stays fairly empty and clean while the shows are moved to a larger set of drives scattered amongst my PCs. I prefer to use the Tablo as a staging area and therefore don’t need a large drive. My Tablo USB drive is simply a daily, temporary storage medium.

Suffice to say that I haven’t had any problems viewing the recorded shows LOL through the Roku\Tablo…because I rarely use the Tablo for viewing. For me it’s a handy, wife-approved medium for scheduling recordings and looking at the guide. In this sense my Tablo doesn’t need to contend for its own resources internally because I seldom use it to view shows. It has most of its resources to itself for JUST recording.

I also view live events through the TV’s antenna hookup (much faster than the Tablo) and never use the Tablo for watching live TV. So once again the Tablo has its own resources all to itself for simply recording shows. In any case, there is NO device that can show HD in all of its purity like the simple antenna to TV coax connection. (Nor BTW is there a device that can do the great job Handbrake does to convert MPEGs to MP4s with all of the options available).

The less I depend on the Tablo as a media hub, the less problems I see, the less frustration I get…

Oh and BTW, allowing the Roku Media Player to handle my viewing allows me also to use all my old pre Roku3s that can’t handle Tablo without having to replace them.

Phil,

My motives are simple. I come here to seek a solution for a poorly functioning Tablo. You previously led me to a partial solution, when I reduced my reboots by shortening the Tablo to router cable from nearly 70 feet to approximately 3 feet, a change which should not have made a difference unless my Tablo box has a weak Ethernet RJ-45 port or transceiver, which it apparently does. Although I was then forced to add 70 feet of antenna feedline with resulting signal loss, the trade was worth it to reduce roughly 20 reboots per day to then about 10. Fewer channels without reboots is much more reasonable for me and WAF than more reboots. I welcome constructive technically sound suggestions. Thank you.

Larry

Please PM me if you feel the continuing need to carry on. This forum deserves better.

Larry

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All hardware here was purchased new. I have 1 Roku connected at the router and the others via switches. All work similarly. I watch 4K UHD 100 Mbits/sec at approx 5 times the Intetnet Netflix and Amazon UHD bitrate, no issues. I have 41 connected devices, most of which are either idle or sleeping or turned off, a complex network for sure.

All of this network equipment and 41 devices were present in April except for 1 additional Samsung 4K TV which was not then online and all worked fine as was Tablo playback in April, After the firmware updates Tablo no lionger played properly. In September, after 2.2.6. I now also see Loading Please Waits occasionslly. All other devices, players, etc. have no network issues. Tablo fails to connect from iOS occasionally as does Tablo from Roku.

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My Tablo, Roku 4 and Fire TV are all connected directly to a GigE router via 3ft Cat6E cables - and I have all the classic 2.2.6 issues with both Roku and Fire TV - so if that is the fix, it isn’t working for me.