Not long after my last post, the picture froze on NBC while the audio continued. I backed out of the channel and reselected it and I fell asleep shortly thereafter to it working fine. This morning I turned the TV on in the living room, planning to let it play in view of one of my security cameras. But just a couple minutes into streaming (also NBC) it started stuttering and pixelating. It recovered a couple times, but it was clear there was a problem so I just turned it off. This was a different TV than last night, and the furthest Fire Stick from the router, but I think I’ve established (several times over) that my WiFi is strong and not any kind of bottleneck. However, I can’t be 100% certain that it’s not the server choking on it. That was my concern even trying this – that I couldn’t trust any negative results. My laptop isn’t significantly newer than the desktop, but it does have an i5 processor (3360M, 2.8 GHz) and 16 GB RAM. I recall PMS being rather easy to install last year, but would I be able to install it on my laptop to test the Hauppauge tuner with it? I need my Plex Pass for the TV/DVR functionality, as I recall – can I activate that on a second system? I suspect it wasn’t the server, but I’d love to know for sure.
Working on the assumption that the problems AREN’T from an under-powered server, that leaves two options as I see it:
Router.
Poltergeist.
I suspect my best course of action is to pick up a good Netgear router after work and give that a test tonight. If that doesn’t help, then I’ll start digging up my yard looking for evidence of a sacred burial ground.
Or depending on your situation, I can tell you the Google WiFi is pretty solid for $99 if a single one will provide you enough coverage for testing purposes since a 3-pack will run $250+.
Also, just throwing this out there as an option for a Plex Server…you can have an NVIDIA Shield TV function as a light weight Plex Server. I did that for over a year with no issues. Just recently moved back to just using the Tablo apps because I’m in a season of trying to simplify things and was trying to remove extra processes.
I’d prefer to just get the router that I would permanently move to if it works, assuming Linksys wouldn’t do anything to quickly troubleshoot whatever issue is apparently affecting its handling of HLS. A single Google WiFi wouldn’t be enough, as it’s a little over 2,000 foot house. That said, the routers I’m looking at aren’t significantly cheaper than the Google 3-pack. I’m trying to decide between the Nighthawk AC2300 ($180; dual band) and AC3200 ($217; tri band). The cheaper AC2300 is comparable to my Linksys in total throughput, but the Linksys is tri-band.
Tri-band doesn’t mean more square foot coverage, just more devices can be handled at once. I’d buy a router that you could easily return just in case it doesn’t work.
I love the idea of mesh networks to cover large areas, but I’m not sure how it will work with the Tablo.
I realize that. I was just trying to decide if having the flexibility of the extra 5GHz band is worth the extra $40. I suspect that the answer is no, since there’s just two of us in the house.
I’ll probably run to Best Buy at lunch to pick up the AC2300.
I have not seen any issues so far with my Tablo QUAD sending video to my 4K Fire TV Stick connected to and Asus OnHub meshed with 3 other Asus OnHubs. The QUAD is wired to Gigabit switch and the OnHub mesh is being fed with Gigabit fiber service.
The main OnHub is connected to my AT&T Residential Gateway (the router connected to the fiber) and I have one OnHub that is Ethernet backhaul fed with a MoCA adapter. The other two OnHubs are connected wireless. The Amazon Fire Stick I use the most is connected to one of the purely wireless OnHubs. The Tablo is fed into a switch the gets gigabit Ethernet from another MoCA adapter.
If I had the Tablo connecting wirelessly to the network, instead of wired, I could see where that might be susceptible to some of the mesh network issues the article mentioned.
The Motorola ones I picked are $59.99 a piece at Amazon. Bought one to connect to the main router, one for the coax connection at my Living Room TV (feeding a gigabit switch) and one for the bonus room coax connection over the garage (also feeding a gigabit switch.)
Using just the mesh network I could get up to 200mbps in the bonus room but with the MoCA I get the full 940mbps up and down and about 450mbps through the wireless OnHub.
I’ve got the Netgear router in my car. Before I do anything with that, I got to thinking about how the best hypothesis I have re: the router is that an automated update happened last fall that triggered the problems we started experiencing. So I looked up a history of software updates for my router and found the following:
Would anybody try factory resetting the router to see if that fixes it? And then disabling the updates? I otherwise really like the router and it covers the entire house very well. Too risky?
I’m spending more time testing Plex on the desktop. It dawned on me that the problems I experienced this morning trying to stream were without having had checked on the server. I just checked and discovered that while I had it set to never sleep, it was set to hybrid sleep (something I wasn’t even familiar with). So maybe it was still waking up during the couple minutes I tried to stream.
Last night I decided to tidy up a bit. Since there has been no discernible difference between my original antenna cable run to the office and the alternate run to a spare bedroom (in which I’d been testing for the past several days), I reconnected everything to the office and connected the antenna to the Hauppauge tuner in my Plex server via that cable.
Virtually flawless operation last night of the Hauppauge tuner via Plex and with playback via Fire Stick (WiFi). I set it to record Dateline and a 2-hour 20/20 that overlapped it. We watched the Dateline and it was perfect. The only flaws were when I tried to fast-forward through the commercials too quickly, it sometimes paused for a couple seconds to catch up, I think. I’m sure it was nothing to do with the recording. I then fell asleep to watching live TV. I only was awake from about 11:45 to 12:15, but the security camera shows it was still playing at 1:45 a.m. when my wife came to bed.
I’m leaving the new router in the shrink-wrap while I keep testing this, and I’ve also got the WinExtend software to test the Hauppauge over the network directly. But given how almost instantaneous the problems have been with the Tablo and both Fire Stick and Roku (WiFi OR Ethernet), I feel confident in saying that, at minimum, there is a distinct performance difference between Tablo streaming my OTA signal via its tuners through my EA8300 router and Plex streaming my OTA signal via the Hauppauge tuners through my EA8300 router.
