Last night, around midnight, my ISP took down the internet for their weekly / monthly maintenance. It was down for about 4 hours. From what I have seen from some YouTube videos, I expected my Tablo to be out-of-service… IT WAS NOT. The Tablo played and recorded videos just like normal. It didn’t miss a beat. This morning when I woke-up, I saw that the guide had been updated while I slept (hence I can tell approximately when the internet was back online).
So my question is what, exactly, does Tablo use the internet for… this is need to know information. How long of an outage would begin to affect the unit? After a day I would lose the guide updates and I assume time sync would become an issue after awhile. But these things should not prevent playback of recordings already done (and I am building quite a library of them). So I am thinking that even a week’s outage might go by okay???
CS Processing and Guide Updates. It uploads a file to their servers for processing of commercial skip…so no internet means no CS processing. For guide updates, I used to think that the only updates to the guide were at the end of a 2 week period, but I’ve discovered that I sometimes get updates to tomorrows guide schedule…so, yes, you could do without the internet for an extended period of time without the tablo particularly caring…as long as you aren’t using FireStick that is…
I am concerned about the time sync… my Tablo has not been powered down for about 10 days. The blog post describes the NTP check being done at power or start up. Should I worry about “time drift”… i.e the Tablo internal clock losing accuracy. Should I periodically reboot / restart my Tablo to correct this? Or is the drift too small to worry about?
If it’s just your ISP is down time drift isn’t a problem unless it’s down for 6+ months.
What you can do is run the ifconfig/ipconfig command on either Windows or Mac and determine what your IP lease time is. Then you would have to determine if the DHCP server that you are using goes down when when the ISP goes down.
That gives you a clue to how long any of your LAN devices can use the ethernet(IP address) without renewing their IP lease.
Another question, I have noted a very strange behavior… not a problem really, but it makes me scratch my head. I like to watch the local morning news with my 1st cup of coffee, I sleep late (I am a retired night-owl), so I set a recording for 9am to catch the news, which is a hour long by the schedule. Anyhow, the first day, I got 2 recordings 7 minutes and 50 some odd minutes. I thought nothing of it. Now it has happened 4 days in a row. The exact same timings… 7 minutes and 50 or something like that. Once or twice, co-inky-dink. 3 times, starting to be a pattern… 4 times in a row… this is not a random chance happening. What’s going on?? Power failure at the same time each morning? Maybe, I am asleep at that hour of the morning.
There is construction in my neighborhood for the last week, perhaps this is when the workers show up each morning and cause some power surge??
It’s odd the segments are seemingly the same size each day but multiple segments generally indicate a reception or power issue that caused the Tablo to reboot.
Okay… yes, both recordings broke at the same 7 minute mark. I got up early to try and catch it, but didn’t manage it… I got up at 9:23am and both the recording of the news and Law & Order had breaks at 9:07am. So I do not think it has anything to do with signal quality (both stations have a very good signal). I am now leaning to a power surge. To test this theory I guess I need a surge protector (was waiting to get one, hoping for a Christmas present).