I’m having a lot of what look like buffering problems with my Tablo 4-tuner running on WIFI using an Apple Airport Extreme router. But maybe they are hard disk problems or something else. These problems are very intermittent - sometimes the playback works fine and sometimes it buffers constantly.
Playback is usually on an Android phone or tablet; the problems occur on both. The WIFI signal is strong, according to the Amped :“Wifi Analytics” app running on my Android phone.
So how can I diagnose this problem? Does the Tablo keep a log of problems that I can look at? Does it provlde any other diagnostics? I can’t see any under “Settings”…
So self-help is not possible? I’ve got a setup that is not working very well, and I’m accustomed to dealing with software and technology. I don’t really need an Tablo engineer until it’s clear that there’s really a problem with the Tablo.
Thanks! I took a look, but didn’t find what I was hoping for.
I would like to check the health of the hard disk to see if that’s the source of my problems, and whether there’s problems with the WIFI connection to my player devices. I don’t see that in any of the logs.
The logs that are there don’t have timestamps. That’s surprising and makes it hard to correlate the logs against real world events.
I wonder if there’s a way to turn on more logs to help diagnose problems. This looks like some kind of server, so maybe there’s a way to get into the OS details.
Tablo on wifi is not that great. If you have to use wifi then you shoud use a lower recording setting. Probably even lower then the recommended setting.
You can glean the times yourself…
The ‘Last Modified’ value for rec_tcvid coincides with the finishing time of the last recording event’s segment.
All the recorded event segments are in the ‘segs’ directories.
You can actually play each ‘.ts’ segment on your computer.
The ‘Last Modified’ value is there for each segment, too.
The ‘meta.txt’ file contains the recording event info, including air time.
sorry for thread pooper @Koss67
My tablo is on 5 ghz wifi and 40ft away from my ac68u ASUS router…8 meg has looked and recorded with no issues.
I do plan on using a ac1450 netgear to extend my network 5g signal …also 1 g ethernet is where tablo will be hardwired. I will compare LAN and 5 g speeds…170 down, 12 up cox cable
We all know hardwired on at 1gig internet is most of the time optimal
5 ghz…866 in router
I’m not sure what you mean by “Tablo on wifi is not that great”. The whole point of Tablo, as I understand it, is for the client / player devices to be on WIFI.
My Tablo is hard-wired to the router / WIFI access point, which is maybe a foot away. Our player devices (Android phone, Android tablet, iPhone) move around the house as desired. So there should be no problem communicating between the Tablo and the WIFI access point. Any WIFI problems are from the access point to the players.
My access point is an Apple Airport Extreme that supports 802.11 a, b, g, and n. My understanding is that Tablo also uses 802.11n, so there’s no point in upgrading the WIFI to 802.11ac, at least not for Tablo.
I have thought about upgrading to a WIFI mesh network, but since I can’t tell whether my problems are due to the network I’m reluctant to do so.
No, that’s a feature, not the whole point of the product.
A stronger point is having one TV antenna, where it receives the best signals, potentially nowhere near any of the TVs.
The wiring diagrams on the tablotv.com website clearly features the use of WIFI to connect from the Tablo to the player devices.
We recently moved to a new house that has a jumble of old wiring of all kinds. One of my goals with Tablo is to rip out as much of the old wiring as possible. And there’s no other reason to run either Ethernet or coax cable around the place. It’s also great to watch TV from our mobile devices.
So, for me, the whole point of Tablo is the WIFI connection from the Tablo to the player devices. Did I pick the wrong technology for that?
It’s the correct technology, and it does make the product more flexible.
However, wireless networking technology is hampered by signal interference, physical objects blocking signals, …
It’s defintely cool, and we use it extensively, but it comes with its own set of issues.
Our Roku 2 (2015) is on the other side of the house from the wireless router.
It’s around 70 feet away, and the network signal has to go thru 3 interior walls, and my fat head at times.
It works great, with all our streaming apps, including the Tablo.
However, it did take a while to figure out exactly where to place the wireless router, the Roku, and the pots and pans that were on the stove top blocking the network signal.
We also had to settle on using 802.11g for that Roku, because 802.11n just couldn’t penetrate all the physical objects well enough.
What I mean is hardwired Tablo will give you optimum quality. Other reading devices like tablet or Roku don’t have to be wired. I would think that if the Tablo and the reading device are on WIFI, that would mean at least 2 video stream using the WIFI bandwidth, one for the video going from Tablo to the router and one for the video going from the router to the devices. If you have many devices on your network it could become clogged. Some people will probably be able to use wifi only depending of the network, the size of the house and the number of devices using the WIFI at the same time. Personally I had buffering with my Tablo on WIFI. Now that my Tablo is wired, I don’t have any buffering on any devices ether wired of WIFI. I can even stream Tablo on my tablet in my back yard over 50 feet from the router.
Ps: sorry for my English, I am french Canadian…
In my case, my Tablo is hardwired to my router / access point. So there is only one WIFI hop for the video stream.
The suggestion to use 801.11g instead of n is a good idea and easy to do. It’s occurred to me that our house has lathe-and-plaster walls that could be causing some interference. Although my wireless signal measuring app does not show any problem.
@mhl Our support team can check your Tablo’s logs for error pretty quickly. If there’s an abundance of network or disk failures, this will show up on our end. Don’t hesitate to give us a call (1-844-TABLOTV (822-5688) or to send us a ticket.
I upgraded our home WIFI network from 801.11n to 801.11ac and the buffering went away on our cellphones, which can do 801.11ac. But I still have buffering on the Android tablet that I bought to use with Tablo. It only does 801.11n.
Conclusion: Tablo should not advertise that it works on slower networks, such as 801.11n. It doesn’t.
Firstly, I got here because of the log file thing.
I was delighted to learn of the existence and potential accessibility of log files! Imagine my surprise and dismay when all of the folders I sampled returned 403 - Forbidden for the log directories.
Is that a recent development?
This isn’t strictly true. 802.11n works potentially just fine with certain bandwidth streams. The issue probably arise more noticeably if you expect Tablo and your device to be wireless. Note that Tablo recommends that the Tablo be Ethernet connected to the network THat means only one leg of the connection has to utilize the 802.11n bandwidth.
I noticed a significant improvement on my playback experience using a wired Tablo when I compare the older Roku I have to newer model that’s 802.11ac-capable.
Alas yes - the logs have gone to Kansas. No longer there in 2.2.18. In other news not sure if folks know this, but the Tablo does have a valid iperf3 instance that runs constantly. It’s been incredibly useful for me to diagnose a broken wifi segments. iperf was written by a few friends of ours at the department of energy. We used to use it to diagnose national long haul 100GBit/s network links - very useful, many options. You can spin up multiple threads with -P also to test throughput and emulate multiple clients.
