Just curious if anyone has had problems if they try to view a recording at the same time the program is being recorded? I was recording a program last night, and started watching about 5 minutes after it started so I started watching the recorded episode. About once every twenty or thirty seconds the audio would skip a word of dialog, and the image would pixellate slightly for a frame or two. After that it would be normal until the next 20 or 30 seconds had passed.
I stopped watching the recording and switched to live-view (but I was still recording) during one of the commercials, and there were no problems at all watching the live broadcast.
Could this be a problem with disk access speed? I’m using a Western Digital Passport 2TB drive… Or maybe because my viewing time was so close to my recording time as a cache limitation of some sort? Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Thanks… (This is a bump of this topic from Troubleshooting into General Discussion)
Typically, in my own experience, the Tablo box receives the OTA signal and records the program to the attached disk drive. The box used to view that recording connects via a network to read the same disk drive for playback. While the Tablo writes to the drive, your viewing device (smart TV, android, iphone, et.c) contends for the drive’s access and so conflict can arise. We solved the problem by not trying to watch recordings and instead use that time to watch Netflix, Prime Video, etc. I understand that a disk device having a high speed interface may solve the problem, but it may be more expensive, larger, or use more electricity.
I could see this happening if you were using a USB stick, of which generally have poor drive performance. I don’t remember if tablo opened up the ability to use these, but mechanical hard drives are much much better performing.
Also there is no such thing as a true “live view”, in all cases the tablo is writing the OTA stream to a file on the hard drive and in all cases clients are reading this stream from the hard drive. The only difference is are you 7 seconds delay or are you 107 seconds delay?
We get a glitch at times when watching one show while another begins to record, etc. For live TV we solved the problem by simply installing a 2nd antenna directly to the TV. This allows much faster channel change.
We also watch the Tablo files through an android box connected directly to the TV and via WiFi to the Tablo.
If glitches get too bad we stop playback, clear memory on the android box and reconnect to the Tablo. That seems to help in most cases. Just a lot of variables when using a mix of equipment. i.e., tv, android, WiFi, Tablo, hard drive, router, DSL modem.