Duration of live TV pause

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Dual Lite –

I want to be able to control the duration of a live TV pause. The way it seems to work is that the pause starts when I hit the pause button and it ends some small number of minutes later.

I either want it to unpause when I hit the unpause button, or I want to be able to set the number of minutes until it unpauses.

Mark

2

Ideally, pause lasts as long as you want. But I am sure there are limits in the buffer depending on the live tv quality setting. I doubt they just have a setting to release the pause after so many minutes.

I will say pause does last a decent amount. I have the highest quality settings, and my test pause is still going after 15 minutes.

Update, still going after 40 minutes. This is using a PC. It is possible that it is different with the various clients due to onboard memory varying.

3

It has been a long time back but there was once a thread on this topic and it was indicated that it varies by playback device based on two things.

  1. How the device treats “live” streaming.
  2. The buffer size of the device.

For example (for #2 above) , I can pause it a lot longer on our Roku Ultra than I can on our older gen 1 Roku 3.

However, for Roku at least you can work around it by setting your live show to record first, waiting a minute or two and then start viewing it from the recordings screen.

Obviously this isn’t ideal especially if its a show you had not already intended to record, but the difference here is that the Roku then sees this as a recorded show instead of a live stream and when paused, instead of filling up its OWN buffer, it simply pauses the stream (essentially letting the Tablo build the buffer or in this case, continue to record to the HDD).

But simple answer, there is not a set amount that they can control or make configurable.

4

I’ve experienced varying pause times on the same Roku, depending on:
Roku OS version
Roku Tablo app version
Tablo firmware version

5

OK – I get it.

So consider this a feature request.

Roku should communicate to Tablo that the user has just hit the pause button. Tablo then starts saving the show to the DVR so that the Roku buffer never fills up.

Seems like a mere matter of software. :slight_smile:

6

Yeah, should be simple, right?
I have people telling me that at work all the time. :slight_smile:

7