Help -- Tablo Affecting My Happy Wife and Happy Life

Check the power saving settings on the Samsung tv. If you’re settings are such that the tv auto-updates, it’s possible your power saving settings were changed. Screensaver, sleep, power saving. Look for those.

On my Samsung I have a Roku Streaming Stick + and had the usb to power the Streaming Stick, plugged into the usb on the tv. Tv left unattended, sleep, shuts off power to the USB port.

Derrrrrp!

So now the Roku is powered on by its adapter and not the tv. Solved a lot of issues. :smiley:

The black screen on both TVs was a one-time occurrence. In addition to that, they’ve each frozen at least 3 times with the new hard drive. I’ve had them tuned exclusively to NBC and ABC, the two strongest signals.

And by frozen, you mean a still picture from the video is being displayed?

Did a quick read through of the thread and wondering if you have tried it on any other clients than the Fire TV? Is is as bad on a web browser and mobile device or tablet? I’ve been running a 4-tuner for about 4 years in a couple different cities. Using both a Shield and Roku I had sporadic issues like yours when running wifi but never on the web browser (Chrome) or tablets. That is the main reason I worked to hardwire the Tablo and clients which eliminated all my problems. Mine could have also been the lovely U-Verse router I was using as well.

Yes, any time I’ve referenced freezing, I’ve meant a still image from the video being frozen on the screen.

I actually haven’t tried anything else. My wife has an iPad, but doesn’t even have the app on it. I’ve got the app on my phone but have seldom used it. I suppose I can try that. Is there a PC app? My desktop running my Plex server is hardwired to the router.

EDIT: I’ve got my phone in the bedroom streaming ABC right beside the TV. I’ll let them both go and check in on them from time to time to see how they compare.

There isn’t a PC app per say but the web app. It should be the same one you used to help setup Tablo, scan for channels, enable recording options, etc… Should be my.tablotv.com

It’s not seeing the Tablo there, for some reason. I get a message saying, “Already have a Tablo OTA DVR?” followed by a “Search Again” button. Clicking it does nothing. There’s an “Add via Wi-Fi” button at the bottom, but this PC doesn’t have a wireless adapter. I’m confused as to why it doesn’t see the Tablo that’s hardwired to the same router that the PC is.

EDIT: Nevermind. It didn’t like that I was connecting through a VPN. I’ve disabled that and now it’s found it and is connecting. Once it gets through the sync process I’ll tune it to the same channel that’s streaming in the bedroom on the TV and my phone.

Weird I live in Brunswick Ohio and have no issues with TV summer or winter with a ClearStream 4 v mounted on my second floor wall aimed towards the Cleveland antenna field. I’m to old to get up into the attic to mount this. But this antenna is shooting through multiple walls on the way to the antenna fields.

I also use Roku tv’s x 2 with very good 5 g wireless in the home.

@BlueCalcite Seems like there’s a lot of this going on

Our support gurus have the knowledge and access to logs that can help narrow issues down for you and I’ll guarantee it won’t take another 13 days.

Just give us a ring or drop us an email: www.tablotv.com/ask-tablo

Between shoveling snow from 6:30 a.m. to 11:15 a.m., and again from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., I was able to do a little more testing/monitoring yesterday.

First, to finish the story of the testing from Saturday night, when I had ABC streaming in the bedroom TV and my phone – both devices ran multiple hours (at least 6) without becoming frozen. Note, though, that I wasn’t monitoring them the whole time, just checking in on them occasionally. So I suppose they could have been stuttering and recovering, but at least they weren’t freezing and just staying in that state for hours. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of anything or not, but when I first started playing them, the stream on my phone was about 2 seconds behind the stream on the TV with the Fire Stick. Several hours later, the phone was closer to 10 seconds behind. What might this be a sign of? As a reminder, this was after having replaced the hard drive, during heavy snow, and with the quality settings still at 720/5. This was actually a really confusing result to me, because there was plenty of freezing on that TV and the guest room TV for a few hours immediately after replacing the drive (during the same heavy snow). This test was simply to see if there was a difference between the Fire Stick and the Android app on my phone, and it left me scratching my head at what it all means about whether the hard drive is part of the problem.

Now jumping to yesterday. Still uncertain about what (if anything) I’d learned, and more than a little discouraged about it, I began watching the football game on Fox in the afternoon. Fox is a little weaker signal for me than ABC and NBC, but has never given me a problem. Suddenly I was getting not freezing, but occasional pixelation, with brief appearances of the little animated arrow until the picture righted itself a couple seconds later. It was snowing pretty steadily, though not as consistently hard as it did all day Saturday. This continued and seemed to get worse until eventually I got the “weak signal” message. This was the first time I’d seen that message, I think, as even when I was doing my systematic testing with the attenuator pads I was simply doing a channel scan and recording how many dots the Tablo was reporting for each signal, not actually monitoring the streams for the appearance of the weak signal error. Figuring I had nothing to lose, especially since the new hard drive was already yielding mixed results, and neither more good results nor bad results under those conditions was going to make me comfortable with making a determination of whether the hard drive was at fault – I decided to do something new. I removed the attenuator pads (but kept the 15 dB amp bypassed) to see if anything changed. At minimum, I wanted to watch the football game (and the following one on CBS, also not my strongest signal), so I figured that was my best chance. Maybe I’d get lucky and all the problems would go away, revealing the hard drive to have been the problem all along.

The pixelation immediately ended, and I watched both games without noticing any glitches. Certainly no freezing. Last night I tuned it to NBC (stronger signal) and fell asleep to that. My wife reports that when she came to bed at 1 a.m., the TV was dark (screen saver? I need to look into that), but as soon as she pressed a button on the remote the stream resumed. Also, before I went to bed I tuned the guest room TV to ABC (strongest signal) and let it run all night. When I left for work this morning it was still playing (obviously, though, it hadn’t been monitored for glitches, but it wasn’t frozen).

At this point, maybe I’m just too desperate to be optimistic about something, but I’m getting my hopes pretty high that these results will continue.

Thank you. Yes, I meant to do that this weekend. I’ll grab the required numbers from the bottom of the unit tonight and see if your team can see anything on your end.

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You replaced the hard drive which meant that you had moved some cabling and possibly the Tablo. In testing immediately afterwards you noted freeze ups in the video on 2 TV sets. But later in testing with a TV set and your phone there were no freezes. You wrote: “This was actually a really confusing result to me, because there was plenty of freezing on that TV and the guest room TV for a few hours immediately after replacing the drive (during the same heavy snow). “)

So something changed after you replaced your hard drive, and ran the initial set of tests.

What else did you change after those ‘initial tests’ and before the testing with your phone on Saturday?

Was your phone already connected to the Tablo?
Did you change some Tablo device setting on your phone?
Did you change some Wifi setting?
Did you physically move the Tablo further away from your router?

Did you begin to use your phone to connect to the Tablo immediately after you purchased and installed it or sometime later?

You might want to try to reinstall your old hard drive and continue to watch your weaker stations. Maybe your hard drive has nothing to do with this problem?

What else did you change after those ‘initial tests’ and before the testing with your phone on Saturday?

I didn’t change anything between the two sets of tests. No settings, anyway. At most, that might have been when I placed some of those rubber feet/bumpers on the bottom of the Tablo, so I would have manipulated the device for that, but it wasn’t moved anywhere. My phone was not already connected – I connected that right before starting that test.

When I got home from work tonight ABC was still playing fine in the guest room. I had an unexpected errand to run, during which I tuned the bedroom to Fox, the living room to NBC, and left the guest room on ABC. I just returned a few minutes ago (2 hours later) to find NBC frozen in the living room, but ABC and Fox still streaming fine. So much for the optimism.

Until coming home to find NBC frozen, my plan was to let things go another day or two as-is to verify that everything was fine, and then try the old hard drive again to confirm things. Now, I’m not sure. Time to reach out to Tablo Support for their input.

I would move Fox to your living room and see if it locks up there. And move NBC to the bedroom to see if it does not lock up. A problem with Fox then would indicate a Wifi problem in your living room.

I wonder if part of this problem is that one Tablo can not really supply data in a timely way to 3 FireTV sticks? If that was a problem then the FireTV Stick affected would be somewhat random.

I would move Fox to your living room and see if it locks up there. And move NBC to the bedroom to see if it does not lock up. A problem with Fox then would indicate a Wifi problem in your living room.

I’ll try Fox in the living room tonight. I always watch NBC in the bedroom at night as I’m falling asleep. The night before last is when my wife reported the TV screen was black when she came to bed in the middle of the night, but as soon as she pressed a button on the remote the NBC stream resumed. I’m not sure what that was, but last night I disabled everything I could find related to energy saving. I watched it from 11:00 p.m. until sometime after midnight without problems, but I haven’t spoken to her yet about what state it was in when she came to bed.

In the guest room, ABC was still playing when I woke up this morning. If I recall correctly, I tuned it to that Sunday night before bed, so that went the better part of 36 hours without permanently freezing, though who knows if it had stuttered along the way. I changed that TV to NBC before leaving for work, so I’ll check in on it tonight.

I wonder if part of this problem is that one Tablo can not really supply data in a timely way to 3 FireTV sticks? If that was a problem then the FireTV Stick affected would be somewhat random.

That’s a good point I hadn’t thought of. Maybe my test of three different TVs tuned to three different channels at the same time was unfair. It hadn’t dawned on me that streaming them simultaneously might be harder on it than simply tuning and recording 3 (or 4) at the same time, but that would make sense.

My wife reported that NBC was still streaming in the bedroom at 1:30 a.m. when she came to bed. That’s only 2.5 hours, but that would normally not be possible.

Tablo Support asked me to test without the hard drive, so I’m currently doing that. A little over 1.5 hours so far with NBC streaming flawlessly in the living room. What’s more, since I used to be able to stream at the highest quality, I changed the Live TV and recording quality back to 1080 and 10 mbps. Not a glitch so far.

EDIT: That lasted about 2.5 hours. First the picture froze and the audio continued, but a few seconds later the audio was gone too. Sigh.

NBC still streaming at 2:00 a.m. this morning when my wife came to bed. For the most part, I certainly notice less frequent problems since I removed the original hard drive. To recap, first, with a new hard drive on Saturday, there was some freezing initially (during a snowstorm), but then better until mid-afternoon Sunday. That’s when I experienced some pixelation and a weak signal error during more snow, which was seemingly remedied by removing the 18dB of attenuator pads. Everything was fine on a couple TVs and networks until Monday night when NBC froze in the living room within a couple of hours (Fox and ABC streamed fine in bedroom and guest room). Tuesday night I removed the hard drive at Tablo Support’s request (and increased the quality to 1080/10). NBC streamed fine in the living room for 2.5 hours and then froze. It then streamed fine until close to midnight when my wife got home and switched it to Sling (she has given up on Tablo in its current state). NBC streamed fine in the bedroom from 11ish p.m. until 2 a.m. when my wife came to bed.

Recognizing better (but not good enough) behavior since I removed the old hard drive, I wanted to see if everything would fall apart if I reconnected it. I plugged the old hard drive in before I left for work (without the anntenuator pads, and with the quality still set to 1080/10) and tuned the living room to NBC and the guest room to ABC. By the time I got to work (i.e., within an hour) I was able to see on my phone app that NBC has already been released by the tuner, so something happened in the living room. ABC is still blinking red.

I’m currently awaiting a response from Tablo Support about my experience last night after disconnecting the hard drive completely.

EDIT: I forgot that I can actually see part of the living room TV on a security camera. The screen appears to be black, not frozen, unless it froze during the fade-out between commercials (which has happened once). There’s no reason for the TV to have shut itself off or otherwise go into any kind of energy saving mode after such a short period of time, so I’m not sure what happened.

EDIT 2: And 15 minutes later, my phone app is showing ABC no longer occupying a tuner in the guest room. That channel had streamed for 36 hours continuously in that room from Sunday night until Tuesday morning (before I changed channels) with the new hard drive. Granted, it was also at the lower 720/5 quality settings.

I finally connected the guest room TV via ethernet using the Fire Stick adapter. With the old hard drive still attached from this morning, quality at 1080/10, I started streaming NBC in that room and in the bedroom over WiFi, and ABC in the living room (WiFi). It took close to an hour, but while watching the WiFi stream in the bedroom it suddenly started stuttering and then froze in a half-pixelated state, with the little blue circle running constantly. I ran to the guest room for the big reveal… the same network streaming via ethernet… frozen, circle spinning. I then ran downstairs to find that one with the message about the tuner having been reassigned or lost connection with the Tablo.

I’ve seen enough crappy behavior with the old drive again. I’m going to connect the new one again and run the same test (same channel on different TVs via WiFi and ethernet).

For what it’s worth, the old drive seems to check out fine when I let Hard Disk Sentinel look at it. 100% health and nothing in the SMART data that looks bad.