First, possibly last day with Tablo

General Discussion
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Got my Tablo today, 4 tuner. I already have Rokus on all my TVs, and I have to say that setting it up was easy. Plug and play. I got live TV streaming to my Rokus within 15 minutes.

But…

I have not cut the cord yet, I still have Directv hooked up, and was going to run these concurrently for a while to evaluate not just the Tablo, but the recently acquired antenna.

The first problem I had was that I was watching a football game while it was still being recorded. That was working fine, until I wanted to back out and look at the guide for a while, then wanted to resume the game. But it started over at the beginning. Luckily I had noted the time before I backed out, so I just had to FF over 3 hours worth of stuff. I tried it again a few times to see if it would ever ask me if I wanted to resume, but it never did.

I’ve tried it again with Saturday Night Live and had the same problem. I tried other shows and it asks if I want to start over or resume. Maybe it has something to do with the idea that I was recording things that had extended time? (Not sure about SNL, maybe it was doing extra time since it’s live? Don’t know.)

Since I’m just testing stuff, I told it to record something off the guide. I used my phone to set that up and… it just didn’t do it. Thinking that maybe I just did something wrong, I used the Roku to set up a couple more recordings. And again, whiff.

I have been using DVRS for about a decade, and I seem to recall maybe one time before where something didn’t record when I expected it to.

I mean, come on. That is the PRIMARY JOB of the DVR. To record things! If it can’t do that at least 99% correctly, it isn’t even a real product. (And 99% is a low bar, really. By comparison, if your power was on 99% of the time, you’d be spending 3+ days a year with no power. That doesn’t happen without natural disasters.)

I like that my car has seat warmers and will show me GPS data, but if it fails to go from point A to point B, it ceases to be a car. By the same token, this can’t be considered a DVR.

I guess I will give it a few more tasks tonight and see how it does, but right now it’s recording about 50% of what it is suppose to do. I’ll report back tomorrow sometime.

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I just noticed that the unrecorded episodes are still sitting in the “Scheduled” section. If I click them, it tells me how long ago they ended.

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I gave the thing a reboot ahead of the recordings to see if that helps.

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Are your inning the latest firmware on the Tablo?

Is the antenna signal strength good on the channels where recordings aren’t occurring? If you watch live TV through the Tablo on these channels, do you get pixelation?

I have had the Tablo Dual tuner since May 2014, and it’s never missed a recording, so it’s been 3+ years of reliability.

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Hi, I’m a relatively new user to Tablo as well. I think I’m on my second week or so. I will admit that in the first few days I wasn’t too happy either - not your level of issues though. For me mostly there were ghosted programs in the guide that caused my Roku’s to crash back to Roku home screen.

Nothing much worked for me. I eventually nuked the whole setup by reformatting the hard drive on a different OS, and holding the blue button on the back of the Tablo down until it went into factory reset. After that, with the benefit of hindsight, I went back to setting up my Tablo again - choosing the right set of channels, setting up recording events, etc.

Since then it’s worked flawlessly and I’ve not had any issues. Before you return your Tablo, you may want to try that. No issues with NFL events, etc.

Take a note of what channels you have selected for the guide, make a note of programs you’ve set to record, etc.

I’m not sure if this is relevant, but the only channels I include are those with 5 green dots. Fortunately for me, those are all I need, I have no need for the infomercials etc. with orange or red dots.

Best of luck with your cable cutting effort. I’m now happily cable-free.

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Not sure why you are having the problems with the non-recordings - I have never had that specific problem. But it is possible it is your hard drive. Tablo will have issues with certain HD’s that will put themselves to sleep due to inactivity. Tablo will interpret this as not having an available antenna. You may want to try a different HD.

As far as the not getting the resume vs start from beginning option, that happens to me often. I believe that if you do not exit the recording properly it won’t give you the option. For instance, I use Fire TV & if I accidentally hit the home button instead of the pause button then go back to the recording it will not give me the option to resume & start over. Also I could be wrong but I think that if you are viewing a recording prior to it finishing & stop & go back it will not give you the resume option. This is one of my biggest complaints - Tablo doesn’t operate at full functionality until a recording is complete, no thumbnails & no resume option.

To make things worse, after the last update (to Fire TV app) recordings couldn’t even be viewed until they were complete. Tablo quickly got it fixed once they realized the update had this flaw, but still…

Overall I am happy with my Tablo, no real competitors has it’s flexibility as a whole home DVR using wifi, watching on numerous devices, & remote access abilities - all in a plug & play device. But it is not without it’s flaws. But if you have a solid wifi network, a good antenna (properly setup), & good strong local signals then Tablo is a solid choice for OTA viewing.

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Update: after rebooting last night, I set up 4 recordings, and it got them all. I’d already set up the 4 NFL games for today, and so far it is 3 for 3.

So I think at this point I’m willing to chalk up the misses as… I don’t know, setup weirdness. Downloading the guide, scanning for channels, new hard drive. Beats me. But I’m going to continue with the Tablo experment for now. Because otherwise, I like it. I like how easy it was to set up and how the scanning over the network for the device just worked, and the PC browser controls I can use.

My only other problem is that it sometimes won’t ask me to resume a program rather than just starting over. That happened on one of my overnight test shows. I watched for a minute or two, then went back to the guide, and when I went back it just started over. This problem is not really a deal breaker, since most shows are usually an hour or half-hour. And I will just take note of the time if I do it during a football game, since I know about it.

I plan to keep track of hits and misses recording wise. Currently 10-for-13

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@theuser86 I think there could be something to the weak signal thing. I did a rescan this afternoon and some of the signals were weaker than I expected, and weaker than they were when I first set it up. If it is this, then I’d consider the missing recordings a non-issue and see where it goes from there.

I kind of wish Tablo would put a placeholder file in place, something it could read and at least say “Signal was not adequate for recording.” So I would at least know it shouldn’t be considered a bug.

Thanks for you suggestions.

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@Bardel Thanks for the feedback. My setup was actually really easy, I was surprised at that. No issues with my Rokus so far. I’m going to look into the signal strength.

@rccolts I’ll keep the HD in mind, thanks. I’ve tried to notice a pattern with the “no resume” problem, but haven’t yet. I tried hitting the home button directly in one of my tests, but that program allowed me to resume. And as I was watching Football today, I backed out of watching (though not all the way back to the guide) and it allowed me to resume even though the recording was still in progress.

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What USB HDD are you using with the Tablo anyway?

If the recording failed due to weak signal, it is supposed to tell you failed because of weak signal.

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The missed recordings are very peculiar. As you observed, if the signals are weak and the recordings fail - the Tablo apps will tell you this if the recording fails.

Feel free to send your Tablo’s MAC address (printed on the bottom of your unit) to me in a PM, or to our support team in a ticket (or you can call us at 1-844-TABLOTV (822-5688) and we can take a look at your unit.

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I am on the my second Tablo because I strongly believe my first one was defective. Had all random (but repeatable) issues within the first 2-3 weeks of owning the first unit. Since I replaced it I have not had any issues no matter how hard I try to recreate it.

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