My Tablo has died đŸȘŠ

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Those of you who have been on here for awhile likely know that I am very happy with my Tablo. I won’t pretend it is perfect, but for the money I think it is great. I have been fortunate that I have had very few problems with mine, even the Roku OS14 Debacle, and the recent major server outage did not cause me too much trouble. I don’t doubt that others have had significant problems, and I know I have been lucky.

Well, my time has finally come. Last night in the middle of the evening news it just quit and told me “Tablo Not Found.” After some troubleshooting I realized my Tablo had died a sudden death
 no lights
 no nothin’
 and it is literally cold to the touch. The power supply tested okay
 tried resetting
 I got nothin’

I called Tablo Support this morning. I spoke to Joel, who could not have been nicer. We ran through his tests and he agreed it was a goner. He said that Tablo will be sending me a replacement.

I will admit that I am disappointed that it died so soon, but I love that they are willing to stand by their product. I still think it is tremendous value for money.

My only lingering disappointment is that, even with an external hard drive, there is no way to salvage the recordings or programming from my old unit. It took me quite a while to get it dialed in just the way I like, and I had about 20 hours of programming that I hadn’t yet watched. At least it happened well before the Fall shows started back up.

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You have reminded me of my top two’s to keep and to change:
keep 1. ability to connect tablo to my network using wifi, no hard connection to roku or router needed.
2. free guide (yes even with all its issues)
change 1. make possible to play recordings on other devices
2. make possible manual programming; this would be easier if there were desktop accessibility

BTW I know the guide can have problems; but I am skeptical that a pay guide would in sum be more reliable.

And actually a #3 change: beef up systems capability and maintenance :man_lifting_weights:

YMMV

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IMO, that it is a major flaw, that having a failed unit, a new one can’t recognize the hard drive as one set up in their format.
Simple fsck command can check for errors on it and correct most without having to reformat it.
Not sure what their reasoning is.

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I think that the reason a new unit won’t recognize the previous external hard drive might be because of DRM issues. The external drive is tied to the initial Tablo device. Because of DRM, you are not allowed to move the external drive to another device.

5

To the best of my knowledge, the Gen 4 Tablo doesn’t support DRM. I suppose it could be some sort of legal “cover our asses” thing. I think it is more likely a coding choice. Somehow, the hard drive is “paired” to the specific Tablo unit. I likely builds a table that keeps track of all the directory paths; how the individual clips stitch together (about 300 for a half hour show); where viewer are in different shows; etc. There is an awful lot of data in there and the need to match it all up between the internal and external storage.

I really think it comes down to some early programming choices, and it is too much work to change it now. Still, it would be nice.

I don’t know if the Legacy Tablo had this problem.

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I thought DRM is not significant to OTA recordings of ATSC 1 which is unencrypted anyway and since 1934 I can record, edit, whatever for my personal use.
Or maybe all that changed for DVR’s?

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I’m sure you will correct it, but you said “since 1934”. Anyhow, yes ATSC 1.0 broadcast can be captured by anyone and successfully played back. So yes, you can build your own DVR.

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Glad they’re sending you a replacement KGBnut

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Long time ago I had discussions with an engineer friend about this. He said the communications act of 1934 gave him the right to intercept and record anything broadcast on the public airways, such as his homebrew microwave TV receiver.

I know, at least I think so, there were no home TVs or video recorders in 1934.

I’m not going to look it all up, but there was also the “Betamax Case” that IIRC went to the supreme court, who decided we can record OTA TV for personal use. Now we are seeing a struggle around the rules of forthcoming Nextgen DRM, wake me when it’s over.

In any event nothing that Tablo can record is in conflict with with DRM rules. But never say never :grinning_face:

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I was thinking specifically about the “VCR” case of the 70’s.

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The reason I said what I did in my previous post is that I had Dish Network and that was the reason they gave for not being able to swap external drives. However, I forgot that the Tablo is OTA and that DRM dosen’t apply to OTA. Sorry!

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You can actually recover these. It is a little bit of work, but not too bad.

My old Tablo died sometime back. I am able to plug the hard drive into my Windows computer and browse into the ‘rec’ folder. The drive is formatted in Ext4, so you will need a Linux file system driver if you are doing this on Windows. I use Paragon Linux File Systems for Windows.

Inside of the ‘rec’ folder are a bunch of numbered sub-folders. Inside each of those is a ‘segs’ folder that contains the actual video files. The show is broken up into multiple 5 minute video files, each with a ‘.ts’ extension.

From a command prompt you can do a binary copy of the individual files to combine them back into a single video.

H:\rec\19958421\segs>copy /b 00001.ts+00002.ts+00003.ts+00004.ts+00005.ts+00006.ts+00007.ts C:\Temp\Combined.ts

I am unsure about other televisions, but my Samsung television can play these '.ts' files directly. You can also convert them to another format using HandBrake.

If you wish to be able to play them directly on the Windows computer, you can use VLC media player.

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I suppose they want to keep it a black box/closed system.

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My old friend @269587 (RIP) would turn off his tablo, remove the hard drive, and pull the recordings. Plug it up to his MAC with a combo of ffmpeg, handbrake, and something else. Plug the hard drive back in and power up the tablo. It would operate like normal.

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You can connect the external drive to a PC using an ext4 mounter and all the video files are there with no drm. I was able to watch programs on my PC and u can convert them using handbrake they are mpeg format

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Thank you for the suggestion, and you are absolutely correct. I had dug around my Tablo’s external drive when it was fairly new. I run Ubuntu on my laptop, so I had no trouble accessing the files. Yes, I know that I could string all the clip files back together with some electronic trickery (my recollection was that the clips were about 10 seconds long, meaning hundreds for a 60 minute show). But, that solution is really only appropriate for us techno-geeks. It is not convenient for most users. I know my wife wouldn’t want to be bothered to do all that. She wants to just click buttons on the remote, and watch her shows.

I know that Tablo has other priorities, but I really think that this should be a capability.

17

Good news! Tablo was kind enough to send me a new unit to replace the dead one. I got it today and it took only minutes to set it up. I had remembered most of my settings, such as Audio Compatibility Mode, and most of my channel selections. (Top Tip: The Android phone app is MUCH more convenient for selecting/unselecting channels to appear in your guide.)

Initial tests suggest that the new one is working perfectly. I am going to give it a few days to be sure.

Thanks Tablo for standing behind your product.

5 Likes
18

Okay, I stand corrected. The Tablo does not store all the video content in 6 second clips. For the OTA programming it seems to store in clips of about 6-10 minutes, so an hour long program has about six or ten files. (The streaming channels still seem to sometimes record in very short 6 second clips.)

I had one or two real treasures saved on my Tablo (one that was especially important to memories of my departed father), so I decided to look again at that SSD. I hadn’t done so in about a year. I use Ubuntu Linux anyway, so I plugged the drive into my computer and opened it up. It took some digging, but I found the show I was looking for. It was in ten video files. The files are stored with consecutive names


00001.ts
00002.ts
00003.ts

XXXXX.ts is a variation of MPEG, so I was able to open them with VLC. So, as an experiment, I concatenated the files into one to see if it would play
 and it did! I now had one file that would play all the way through, saving that show that had so many memories connected to it.

I then took it further, I converted the file to a more standard video format and dropped on to my Media Server. I can now watch that program through my Roku anytime I want to, and share it with my kids.


Small victories


Thanks jwhitlow for motivating me to take another look at it.

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Seems to me that that creates a lot of overhead, closing and opening.
Plus boatloads of disk fragmentation.

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I have a GoPro Hero3 that cuts my long bicycle ride videos into 3.5 Gb files, so I download and concatenate them together using FFMPEG. It’s a simple one-line command-line entry + a text file containing all the file names to concatenate.

I used to use the DOS copy command, but FFMPEG gives more feedback and provides some A/V specific features.

I’m sure it would work in this scenario too.