Excellent antenna reception, poor picture quality

I got a Tablo back in 2016 (the square box type) and for the most part it’s worked pretty well all these years. Recently I moved, did a channel scan and got a bunch of channels with all green dots. Yet when I watch live TV the picture breaks up sometimes, enough to make the channels unwatchable. And when I record I get a lot of pixilation and sometimes recordings fail. I’m just wondering if these are all signs that after 5 years my Tablo is starting to die. I’m thinking about buying a new one from Best Buy to see if I get the same problems but thought I’d ask here first. I’m also wondering if a bad hard drive or anything else could be causing this. By the way, the antenna I have connected directly to the TV gives a fine picture and it’s actually a less powerful antenna than the one attached to my Tablo. I guess I just assumed that if I’m getting all green dots on my Tablo channel scan then my picture quality should be perfect.

A few ideas, attach your hard drive to the other USB port?

Try running your Tablo with no hard drive attached, see if Live TV still has picture problems.

Possible weak power supply?

2 USB, first generation tablo, I believe it wasn’t until the Tablo Dual/Lite forward you could go live TV without drive.

I ran my 2-tuner OG Tablo with no hard drive when testing for a bad hard drive, worked no problem!

Yes, I recalled a post, it said the newer ones allows for 2 live steams with out drive… sorry for the misunderstanding.

Just to give an update (and thanks for the comments): I unplugged the USB drive, turned the Tablo on it’s side and changed the live tv and recording settings to 720p (they were on 1080p). Live TV seems better… no pixilation after about 30 minutes of watching a few channels. I’ll try plugging back in the hard drive and do some test recordings to see if the changes I made fixed the problem.

After you plug the drive back in try Live TV again, if the pixelization returns could be a bad hard drive, bad USB cable, or USB port. Tablo will use the hard drive for Live TV if attached.

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.