The confounding aspect of these Tablo / Roku issues has been the wide variation in user experiences, using what we presume are ‘identical’ Roku and Tablo boxes. For whatever it’s worth, 2.2.8. for me was a very big improvement in both LPWs and rebooting while FF.
The same hardware here worked BETTER in March 2015 than now but the performance now is pretty acceptable given what I have dealt with at its worst.
You can believe whatever you want, shalone…but that doesn’t make it true. I watch several hours to TV a day. Primarily live. It has been nearly flawless for me…and that’s not a stretch. My claim is about my experience, and my experience alone. Unless you’ve been watching through my window…it’s not your place to say what is true or not.
I too am always confused about the absolute (beyond any doubt) negativity surrounding anything “Roku”… because I haven’t had many issues at all. However, some do see some problems… so… perhaps there is something there that I just haven’t encountered yet (?). I do think I’ll so some experimentation at some point with Nexus Player (for example)… but that doesn’t mean I’m replacing my Roku’s. I’ve spent hours in succession watching live TV on my 2nd gen Roku (2) XD… no issues at all, even while fast forwarding… I don’t believe my setup is special in any way (most of my devices are Roku 3’s, I just wanted to see “how bad” the large “pretty” interface would operate on a device that wasn’t really made to handle it… and I have been pleasantly surprised so far).
Same here cjcox. My 2.5 (or so) year old Roku 2 XD handles Tablo just fine. Absolutely no LPWs or lock ups or restarts, ever. My Roku Sticks do struggle however but they are far from unwatchable. Maybe one LPW per half hour show. But they are at the far end of the house farther away from the router.
I am mixed. I do have reboots once every few weeks and I usually get at least one LPW per show that I recorded. I used to be on the 10 Mbps setting, but I stepped down one to the 8 Mbps setting.
WatchESPN and Crunchyroll seem to be my other two big Roku culprits for reboots and LPW messages. Netflix and Amazon Prime have always been steady for me. If there was any other streaming box that supported both Funimation and Crunchyroll, I would consider switching.
A lot of times I have to step back and be amazed that anything works! And I mean that in a good way.
The fact that I can email someone 10,000 miles away and get an instant response. Or talk to my new Amazon Echo like I am on Star Trek. Or dictate texts to my phone and have it be nearly 100% correct all the time. Or to think about all those darn packets flying all over my network and the internet and it all just works to stream me a show, make a call or download an app. And half the time it is wireless as well. Freaking amazing.
I can live with Tablo the way it is. I wish LPWs didn’t happen as often, and I am sure things will improve, but regardless, it is an amazing piece of hardware and software to be able to watch shows on TVs, phones and tablets.
I agree. With the complexity of networking alone, the mere fact that many home networks even work is amazing much less to pump video over said network to one or more of a laundry list of devices is amazing.
The TCP/IP standards as well as router hardware to support these transfers evolved in the early to middle 1990’s. Tablo is a LAN versus a WAN solution.
Considering that high quality 100Mb routers are considered ancient and the use of cat5 and cat6 wiring, it’s amazing that a wired LAN connection to a Roku 3 has any problems.
I have no problems watching live TV on my phone over 4G LTE to my Tablo. And I have Sprint (Sprint’s 4G LTE is like other vendors poor quality 3G). I just tell it I can only do 750 Kbps (somtimes I can get 1 Mbps).
Yeah, man a helpdesk or answer family questions for a bit. Its not always as dead simple as it should be.
@MotobikeMan it’s a lot easier than they think. I’m retiring after 44 years as a senior systems analyst in the R&D departments of various fortune 500 software companies. I started out designing operating systems and then spent years on database software.
So driving data between a client and server has become a lot simpler in the last 12 years. Database protocols are much more complex then HTTP. You can take almost any consumer gigabit switch (MTU 1500 - no jumbo packets), 4 old client boxes, a database server and max out throughput (around 885 Mb) without packet lose or client/server delay.
I know, its very easy, for you and for me and most everyone on this form… Not for everyone, just saying.
Yeah, my father in law didn’t… He might just plug both ends of a patch cable into the same switch… This is all I’m saying
Much less doing anything in reguard to port forwarding in a routers setting (or even going into the routers settings at all for that matter)
Been there, done that… LOL !
Wouldn’t you be happier with something better than “pretty acceptable”? It’s out there for exploitation.
Yes, I would be happier if the Rokus were working as well as they did in March, or, if I could take my $600 investment in 7 Roku 3’s and replace them all with Nexus Players without wasting so much time and money.
I thankfully have reached a point after 9+ months of dealing with all of the Tablo garbage that I am just tired or playing with it, dealing with long waits with occasional firmware updates, debating the issues of “who shot who”, and trying to convince my wife and myself that this Tablo experiment wasn’t a complete mistake, that I now have an “acceptable solution”.
My reboots have declined dramatically with a combination of shorter Ethernet cable to the Tablo, multiple firmware updates, and the replacement of the 2 Rokus which we watch together and use most heavily with Nexus Players. The other Rokus are used for relatively short periods, very rarely reboot now, and seldom do LPWs. So I live with the Tablo and the warts, and yes, I do occasionally still grouse and complain, mostly because I think that Tablo is such a great concept and has the potential to be a great product, not unlike my reaction when I hear a beautiful Beethoven symphony being performed by a high school orchestra. I know it could all be a lot better, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for it to happen…
!!!
(3 bedroom + 3.5 baths?)
Bedroom
Office
Laundry
Treadmill
TV Room (projector)
Kitchen
(My prior Sage DVR whole house system, from 2003-2014, had a 7th client installed in our guest bedroom and an 8th client in my basement tool shop/electronics lab)
A 7th Roku of the newer vintage with voice search was purchased when (specious) claims were made on this forum that it had few or no fast forward reboots. I should have ignored them…
BTW, house is below 1500 square feet…no palatial mansion…with long winters near Buffalo NY…and retired people with a simple desire to watch TV without aggrevation…
OK. But aren’t some objections related to the inherent limitations of streaming TV regardless of platform?
Anyway, I prefer the NY Philharmonic’s performance of Beethoven’s ninth. Maybe your local HS orchestra is better than mine. Cheers.
Not really. I have very few issues with ANY of my players, and use Rokus, AppleTVs, Seagate HD Theater+ boxes, 4K UHDTV via DLNA, Samsung Smart TVs, and true live HD streaming I originate for security and other purposes. Although there are occasional stutters and outages due to lumpy Internet QoS, my streaming is generally quite good.
Tablo until April, 2015 was typical. It abruptly turned to a rebooting train wreck then, and only with Tablo 2.2.8 a few weeks ago did it really regain acceptable stability. My players including the Rokus have been otherwise perfectly acceptable for all other channels.
What I’m suggesting is NO streaming system no matter how elaborate or well designed can completely rival an OTA signal directly connected to the TV tuner input in terms of speed, picture quality, and trouble free maintenance. In short, no holy grail under the best of circumstances. Any DVR set up must be considered a trade off in terms of quality vs convenience although HD picture quality can be quite impressive under the best conditions.
Legal disclaimer: All comments contained herein are based on non-techy intuitive logic and personal experience. Any resemblance to actual real time experiences whether living or dead are purely coincidental.