NEW Maintenance Firmware Release - 2.2.8

Go to channel you want to watch and press play, even if no guide data.

You are kind of noisy. When you have a rebooting Roku run a wireshark trace. My money says you are going to see a lot of network retransmissions, out of sequence packets, multiple identical packets, etc. Roku for all the great things it does well, it does not handle a high level of network errors gracefully. The few times I have had a rebooting Roku have been traced directly to a network problem. I kind of consider my Rokus an early warning indicator for something is going wrong with my network. The first place I notice a brewing problem is my Rokus start having some kind of streaming issue. The last time I had an issue, about a year ago a cable modem was going south. Had the ISP come out and replace the cable modem and no more problems with Roku.

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For those who haven’t seen the other thread about the Roku firmware update (9044) from ~2 weeks ago, I can confirm after about a week and a half of watching that I have experienced zero LPWs, FF problems, stalls, reboots, etc. It has gone from a PITA to perfect. So I would have to say whether or not Tablo is perfect, the ongoing issues we’ve been attributing to Tablo at least in a major way for me and others was really something with Roku.

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My network doesn’t seem to have any problems and I can get the Roku to reboot with Pluto TV almost every time by confusing it with multiple remote button presses (that don’t register immediately). I still experience LPW on 228 but not as often and they seem to only come around during bad weather. Watching the same broadcast on Chrome on PC shows pixelating and block artifacting at the same point in the broadcast and recorded programs. My conclusion is that before 228, the Tablo/Roku combo would handle those moments of poor reception with the Roku looping while looking for a reasonable signal to decode. Now with 228, it seems to kinda just skip over those bad packets or whatever it’s called and keeps caught up that way. But to say that all these problems are caused by a bad home network is quite a leap.

I think this is an important point. Signal disruption affects my PC Hauppauge tuner the same way - it causes it to sometimes fail in recording and I’m left with half a show. So sometimes the antenna reception has to be looked at as a source of problematic behavior. A tuner’s “noise floor” or level is part of the recording process.

The day before Christmas, where there was severely inclement weather in the south, I had a signal monitor on my Hauppauge card and despite an 80% signal strength it showed a very high quantity of error packets from the antenna reception stream. The Hauppauge’s behavior was very flakey that day.

Yep. Network issues are going to be there but can be traced and fixed (usually) but with OTA signal reception, the variables are endless. I’ve mentioned that I have a bunch of 150’ tall conifers between my setup and most of the towers only 7 to 10 miles away - over water. I should be golden but with the trees swaying in the wind and getting trillions of raindrops on them all reflecting the signal every which way but loose, it gets wonky every once in a while. The way the equipment handles that wonkiness is essential and I think that in that lays the basis of a bunch of the problems that some are having. That being said, database corruption occurring for whatever reason (IMO based on having the issue twice and fixing it with a FDR), is the other main problem that people are experiencing. Slow menus, button press response time and other annoying quirks all go away with a factory data reset. But so do your recordings and schedules so it should not be done without prep. The other small percentage of problems probably are related to network issues or even hardware failure. Remember how tv signals used to be? I used to have an audio cassette recording I made of a Happy Days episode back in the mid 70’s by holding the mic up to the tv speaker. You could hear the tv signal fading a little and buzzing every once in a while. Today’s digital broadcasts audibly stutter and the picture freezes or goes away when the signal falters. It’s all in how it’s handled by the numerous playback devices and it seems Roku has at least made a good jump.

And unfortunately this causes problems at the hardware level (electrical signals) with a tuner chip that is not designed or manufactured by Tablo (Nuvyyo). It would be easy to say, “Well just write software that traps hardware errors.” But even Hauppauge, after three decades in the PC OTA business hasn’t managed to totally isolate hardware level errors.

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I don’t have any rebooting with Pluto TV, it has a few annoying bugs but no rebooting. I also did not say network issues are the only cause of rebooting from Roku but in my five years of playing with Roku and breaking out my network sniffer, network problems are the primary cause of reboots. I’m confident saying this. It does not mean Roku does not have a bad code release from time to time or channel app does not have properly written code that causes problems.

On a side note, oddly Pluto works very well on my Roku 4, but is pretty buggy on the Roku 3s.

And to quote @Adam: Ding Ding Ding - we have a winner!

Agreed. My point is that OTA signal problems and how each device handles them should be looked at as a big cause of some people’s problems.

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Mine is a Roku 3

I do not disagree with you here at all. My television towers are dead south of me but I actually point my antenna east because I have a giant power substation about a mile away from me that knocks down everything if I point the antenna at it. It took quite a bit of experimenting to find the sweet spot for television stations but I got it worked out with some work.

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That’s putting it lightly! I’ve been up the ladder so many times just to rotate it a degree and back down and into the house to check the signal on a direct-to-tv connection, my thighs are starting to look like I actually work out! :grin:

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A few years ago my antenna started “stuttering” despite years of flawless reception. Finally tracked it down to a malfunctioning transformer on a pole in the street that the electrical company came and fixed.

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Another one of those endless variables I mentioned. I have one of those trasformers about 50 feet down the street in-between the towers and me too…hmmm another thing to consider :pensive:

Ohhh yessss…LOL - variables and variable - can drive one crazy! I now consider it a good week when 6 out of 7 days are OK. I stopped looking for OTA perfection last year in order to preserve my sanity.

When my wife says, “Oh look that show has some pixelation” I respond quietly, “Yep” and doze off…

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iPad Air 2, iOS 9.2, tablo app 1.2.3 (86), tablo is connected via wi-fi not via ethernet cable. when installing the firmware update 2.2.8, must cycle wi-fi on my iOS device off & back on then the tablo app connects to the tablo. received connect ‘pop up’ error at end of firmware update. quitting (via app switcher) & reopening tablo app did not remedy. at some point a fix is nicer than an “error” :upside_down_face::nerd_face:

Did I miss something? As in did I miss release notes for 2.2.9? The reason I’m asking is that I just got an update pushed to me this afternoon - Feb 9th - nearly two months after 2.2.8 was released. Unfortunately I didn’t notice the release number and I can’t check because my Tablo’s LED is still blinking two hours after I clicked “update”.

2.2.8 is the current release. Are you in the beta program? If so, look in that sub-forum for info on any new test builds.

I am not in the beta program. I just received a reply to my support request. Apparently some one made a typo with their MAC address and entered me in the program … Voila, I got 2.2.9 pushed to me.

Still blinking when I left the crib this morning … Hope to get this fixed when I get home.

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