I’ve also seen the freezing issue at times when I fast forward. Exiting and entering the show seems to fix it, at least temporarily. Happens on all my Rokus, but it’s pretty infrequent, at least at this point.
06/05/22 - Ok, happening more frequently and another weird thing… sometimes if I press and hold the right side of the ‘cross’ on the remote, it won’t continue moving forward. And sometimes it will. I really believe Roku screwed this up as I have a similar issue on Youtube.
Since reporting a few issues with Tablo 14 days ago we have not had any during fast forwarding through commercials. Now as far as Roku goes it continues to do flaky things mostly with Youtube. It has always done this.
Try disabling “Auto power savings” in the Roku app: Settings > System > Power > Auto power savings = unchecked. Note that this may use a little more power.
In the “Settings” menu, under the heading / menu choice of “System”, I have 11 different options, but none of them is “Power” (or anything related to “Power”).
Perhaps older Roku models such as my eight year old Roku boxes, do not offer this option?
Larry
I have 2 smart TVs with Roku OS. In Roku Settings → System → Power there is an Auto Power Savings with 2 checkboxes. The first checkbox “Reduce power after 15 minutes” reduces power when the TV senses no activity after 15 minutes. I have it unchecked. The second checkbox “Turn off after 4 hours”, which turns the TV off if it senses no activity in 4 hours. I have it checked, but it is ignored because I have “Fast TV start” enabled.
Regardless, this has nothing to do with the Tablo box itself which does its recording on its own schedule and couldn’t care less what my Roku TV is doing. I suspect the spinning circle on fast forwarding when using the Tablo app has something to do with the recording itself. Some characteristic of the recording is causing the app to have problems when requesting a fast forward of the recording.
I don’t often watch live TV, so I don’t know if the spinning circle happens if I try to rewind or fast foward a live TV show I’m watching.
@MSR This thread is about video freezing while fast forwarding, not the spinning circle. Btw, the workaround above seems to be working for me so far.
If you read the whole thread, you’ll see it is about the spinning circle!
@gce Okay - got it. I did not have this issue and my freezing issue seems to be resolved for now with the workaround above.
I have a newer Roku and it doesn’t have “Power” settings either.
Same here, no power setting on my Roku Ultra 4670X. Must be the difference between a Roku TV and a standalone Roku streamer.
Look under Settings then Network then Bandwidth Saver
The only option using the network bandwith saver is to turn it on and off.
This seems entirely irrelevant.
Nonetheless, I will change it, and see if it makes any difference.
Thanks very much,
Larry
Not surprisingly, the recommendation to fix the freezing and crashing of Roku in the Tablo app by using the Network bandwidth toggle did not work whatsoever.
My freezing and crashing problem can still be provoked just as easily regardless of the setting of the bandwidth switch.
From a fresh start/reboot of the Roku, I can usually get a freeze in less than a minute or two, by fast forwarding on the time line. This scrubbing continues to be exactly the same problem I am still seeing on each Roku of the seven that I have here.
I highly doubt that anyone else will see any benefit from this recommendation whatsoever.
I am still hoping that Tablo will take ownership of addressing this issue, and, at the very minimum, reply to the post made by someone else earlier in this thread, asking them in Ottawa to PLEASE give us some indication as to what is being done here!!
This is a very ANNOYING, FRUSTRATING, FREQUENTLY OCCURRING problem, and needs to be addressed.
Roku is the market leader in set top boxes to say nothing of their TV sets with built-in Roku. We deserve to have a working Tablo app that does not crash and freeze.
Thank you,
Larry
Is this Roku freezing issue occuring only for users that have commercial skip option?
Asking, cuz I don’t have commercial skip, and don’t have this issue at all on 4 Rokus.
I can scrub (fast forward, reverse) at any speed, and no freezing.
If you have commercial skip option, and disable it, does the freezing still occur?
I have 3 TVs, and all 3 run on roku. I have seen the spinning circle obout 10 times in the last month. I just let it spin and after ~30-60 secs the show continues with no problems. We watch about 2-5 hrs of recorded content every day. I have NEVER seen this spinning wheel BEFORE the last roku update, so I assume THAT is the problem. Will report back after the next roku update.
I do not have commercial skip.
When this freezing and crashing issue arose a few years ago with Tablo and Roku, with similar symptoms and the same method to provoke failure (scrubbing), there was no commercial skip. Most noteworthy is that ONLY SOME users had the problem, others didn’t. Same situation here.
That’s what bugs are all about. Why they affect some users and not others has everything to do with code which is exercised for some circumstances but not others, impacting some users but not others in the process .
Something as basic as network topology and error rates can explain this entirely. A heavily loaded network with frequent packet retries, or one which is heavily saturated at some times, may cause scrubbing to get deferred. My only point here is that each of us has different configurations in many ways, and truly correct bug free software handles these cases properly.
Larry
THREE REBOOTS OF ROKU TONIGHT …
Add this to the freezing almost every time I go to use fast forward, and no announced or apparent effort to solve the problem.
The Tablo app for Roku needs to be fixed!
Note that playback using Tablo app does not freeze and crash when playing recordings in progress. Only ‘ended’ and completed recordings fail.
Let me first begin by saying “thank you” to Tablo for eventually taking responsibility for fixing this buggy software. Although it has taken 2 1/2 months, and made use of the Roku extremely unreliable every night I used it since early May, it is now finally working properly again.
As an eight year owner of Tablo since the product was initially released, this is yet another repetition of the same behavior I find so utterly disgusting about product support and quality assurance from Tablo. Thankfully, this bug ONLY took 2 1/2 months to isolate and fix. Several years ago, a very similar crashing fproblem with the Roku player only when running the Tablo app took many more months to fix, and had the exact same process of denial by Tablo, many months of silence despite numerous complaints, and eventually the necessary diagnosis and repair by Tablo, finally released as a “stability improvement”.
I find it additionally astonishing that the eventual announcement of a repair never even has the honest and direct admission that the freezing and crashing bug was ultimately discovered and fixed.
A few weeks ago, totally fed up with the sh*t show from Ottawa, I went out and purchased new Amazon Fire TV cubes for the locations in my home where we most often used Tablo, eliminating entirely, my dependency on the Roku app which Tablo has NEVER properly tested and supported. The Amazon fire app is comparatively bulletproof, and allows me and my wife to watch TV while using the treadmill, while doing laundry, while working in the office, without the nagging and frequently occurring freezing.
Given the immense popularity of Roku, the lack of software quality assurance and adequate beta testing of the Roku app from Tablo is especially disappointing. I am happy to see that it is now fixed, but have no reason to believe that some future release of Roku channel software from Tablo will be reliable.
Thank you once again for finally acknowledging, diagnosing, and repairing your product. The end result is favorable, but the process of getting there totally stinks.
Larry
Before the latest app update my roku’s had the long pauses during fast forward but never rebooted.
Now the pauses are less frequent and last a shorter amount of time. But I have seen atleast one roku reboot. But fear not the hdhomerun app has the frozen app reboot more frequently.
Zippy,
I think my expression of gratitude to Tablo earlier today was, in retrospect, unwarranted, since:
The latest V3 Roku app from Tablo STILL FREEZES AND CRASHES!!
Having now tried it for a couple hours, which I should have done before believing the report of another user that the app is now working, I can report that there is an improvement, but the same problem is still there, only less frequently.
Previously, I could get the app to crash in way less than a minute whereas now it takes a few minutes.
Signs of progress…
And finally, acknowledgment that the issue is within the wheelhouse of Ottawa software development rather than being somehow a Roku operating system issue.
Looks like my switch to other non-Roku players was a reasonable choice, given that we will continue to live in limbo for (probably) many months ahead if waiting for a correct fix.
I said this once before years ago in one of my posts on this forum, and now especially repeat it once again:
Please, please Tablo, engage the services of truly knowledgeable, competent senior software talent to develop and engineer the Roku app software. The Roku box and OS do not have traditional semaphore or other real time buffer management to control I/O and synchronization, making it especially difficult to build real time apps which synchronize properly. The history of your company failing to acknowledge and adequately mitigate the Roku complexity shows in a very, very weak Tablo product which is barely usable. After eight years, this is beyond shameful.
Larry