Live OTA TV as well as BluRay, 4K, etc. are ALL merely streams.
A DVR stream is indeed unlikely to rival the quality of the original OTA given the practice and consequences of downsampling and format conversion used in Tablo and other DVRs, although older MPEG2 DVRs could make truly excellent copies of OTA under some circumstances. There need not be ANY generation loss to recording and playing back digital OTA were the DVR to be designed with that requirement, but consumer DVRs are a cost and performance balance which achieves acceptable results in nearly all respects.
As I previously expressed, very āacceptableā results are being achieved. When I want ultra superb video I turn to 4K ultra high def home movies of grandkids, kids, etc. on a 4K display.
You have something else going on if you are experiencing Roku reboots. Roku reboots when the kernel panics. Probably some kind of network problem. Since you are a retired engineer, get out wireshark and figure out what is going on in your network.
Roku also reboots when its dead man timer does not get what it expects as a timely / sensible reply after waiting, and may additionally reboot for other reasons neither one of us are aware of. I have no interest in further troubleshooting this issue, and have an environment which works beautifully for all my devices with the occasional exception of Tablo LPWs, not annoying enough to complain about, and reboots which happen now measured in DAYS versus my original reboots occuring 20+ times PER DAY.
I am OK with this level of performance for Tablo, as I am with all the other niggles and issues with phantom icons, disconnects from remote access, navigation errors in the access to Nexus Player menus, etc. Tablo has resolved some of these to some extent, and I bought a second Tablo recently based on my confidence that they will eventually solve the rest.
Tablo was shipping nearly 2 years ago now, with first deliveries in February 2014.
Their choice to be all things to all streaming players from iOS to Android to Nexus to Roku to web browsers to Chrome to Amazon Fire with fancy graphics has cost them dearly IMHO.
18 months ago I would have agreed that I was an early adopter. I deliberately waited till late in 2014 before purchasing Tablo in order to avoid āleading edge / bleeding edgeā early adoption problems.
Nearly 2 years into Tabloās release, I can only say that Tablo is a ālate / slow debuggerā.
Larry
Dead man timer is at least in part just the execution point for a kernel panic. I didnāt get what I wanted and I donāt know what else to do so reboot. I think I have seen a whopping three reboots in the last year on my combined 7 operational Rokus. And this is through all the 7.0 firmware updates.
Precisely. Soā¦imagine trying to trouble-shoot THAT with no listings, no interface specs, no idea whatsoever of intended packet traffic, etc.,etc., etc. for either the Tablo or the Rokuā¦
Although very much circumstantial evidence every rebooting Roku I have observed is on a network with problems, excepting the recent round of Roku 7.0 firmware updates.
New Tablo user here. I got my Quad Tuners Tablo yesterday, and it came with 2.2.6 firmware. For some reason it didnāt detect a local NBC affiliate channel. The tv tuner detected the channel fine with/without coax splitter, but Table couldnāt. I updated the firmware to 2.2.8, Tablo picked up the NBC affiliate channel. Switching from PrimeTime to LiveTV is slow. It displayed the guide fast but I could not do anything until maybe 20-30 seconds later.
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.
For those who havenāt 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 weāve been attributing to Tablo at least in a major way for me and others was really something with Roku.
My network doesnāt 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 donāt 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 itās 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 Iām left with half a show. So sometimes the antenna reception has to be looked at as a source of problematic behavior. A tunerās ānoise floorā 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 Hauppaugeās 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. Iāve mentioned that I have a bunch of 150ā 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 70ās 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. Todayās digital broadcasts audibly stutter and the picture freezes or goes away when the signal falters. Itās all in how itās 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, āWell just write software that traps hardware errors.ā But even Hauppauge, after three decades in the PC OTA business hasnāt managed to totally isolate hardware level errors.
I donāt 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. Iām 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.