I have a 4 tuner tablo and a WD 1 TB passport ultra that I have been using without problem for about ten months now.
About a week ago I started occasionally having some pixelation issues with some random channels. Sometimes pixelation on one channel but not the other, sometimes the other but not the first.
After doing a bunch of other things which had no effect on the issue, I discovered that if I disconnect my hard drive I get a clear signal on all channels. Reconnect the hard drive and random channel pixelation occurs.
I saw a couple of threads where a question was asked about disconnecting the hard drive and checking the results, but those threads didn’t have any further information about the issue.
Is anyone familiar with this issue? Is it possible to get back to normal functioning if I reformat my hard drive? Does it sound like I need a new hard drive? Are there other matters at play that I need to look into?
Try connecting your hd to the other usb port, maybe there is some internal interference on the original port Or maybe the drive itself is creating the issue/interference, try another hd as a quick test.
Thanks for the reply. I tried something else this morning, and it looks like it is a problem with two of my tuners.
I went in to live TV and picked four different channels and started recordings. I checked in on those recordings and found a good picture on two of the channels and pixelation on two channels. I stopped recording on one of the channels with a good picture and started down the list of channels (excluding the three that I had started recordings on) and was getting a good picture on every channel.
Then I started a fourth recording again with that tuner. I stopped recording on one of the channels that was showing up with pixelation, and started trying to watch live TV with that tuner. Every channel that I selected showed up with pixelation.
It looks like the hard drive isn’t the problem, it’s just that the problem went away when the hard drive was disconnected. Now I have to see about getting a couple of the tuners replaced.
So I just got my 4-Tuner yesterday and experiencing the same problem. Brand new out of the box HD (WD My Studio Book), but some channels are fine and others aren’t. I’m going to try a different drive tonight, as there have been issues with hard drive reliability, as I continue to read this site.
One of the problems you could be having is file fragmentation I haven’t tried plugging the Linux formatted drive into a pc and run defrag on it. You would have to install a third party utility to do that.
P.s. I just tried extfs for windows from paragon while I was thinking about it but that puts the HD in read only mode as far as defraggler is concerned.however It makes it easy to copy files from the Tablo drive to my Data drive. I then used EaseUs on it which does have a defrag tool, and doesn’t require any add on drivers, and that seemed to work. You could put a fresh drive on the Tablo and see if that effected the issue without risking your data and if so then its either a fragmentation issue or a low space issue. Fragmentation will slow the drives read and transfer rate which could account for some of the issues you are having.
Hey guys, so lot’s of changes. I have a lot of HD’s around here, mainly because they fail so frequently. I elected, despite the cost and personal friends recommendations, to place a 1Tb SSD drive. So far I’ve been very happy. The performance is tremendous. Low heat, Low Power.
Next thing I did, in order to try and get my NBC affiliate, was to add a +15db pre-amp before going into my distribution amp (+4.5db). It was overdriving and made it worse. I then put a splitter (-3.5db) between them in order to pad it a little (placed a terminator in the other splitter port), and then re-checked. Low and behold, the performance for all my stations improved about 12% average, with the NBC affiliate improving 27%. ReScanned Tablo and all station come in Green. No pixilation. The stations on my TV’s look really good now on their direct coax connections. So good news. I’ve got Roku’s on 3 TV’s and I’m testing a new LG Android STB for my company with the Tablo app running on it. So far so good. I will record something and report back, but good news is my Tablo device is working great, and hopefully this post will help someone else out who is having “recording” issues.