NEW Maintenance Firmware Release - 2.2.8

Really looking forward to the upgrade… Tablo is functionally unusable for me via the Roku.

Reboot Roku -> Perfect Tablo playback (for one or two shows) -> LPW increases in frequency -> Freeze / Reboot -> and repeat.

I am very frustrated. :angry:

I’ve had my Roku 3 reboot with Tablo, the WatchESPN app, Pluto TV, and I think Sling too but I can’t remember. Others have reported the R4 rebooting with other channels as well. It is definitely a Roku problem.

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There was a long thread on the Roku forums about this a while back.

I spent endless hours trying to make my (6) Roku 3’s reboot on FF/Play on channels other than Tablo, and loaded numerous channels you and a couple other users claim have FF/Play reboots, NEVER, EVER HAVING A SINGLE REBOOT EXCEPT ON TABLO.

Also, no FF/Play reboots EVER occurred on my 6 Rokus for the first 5 months I owned my Tablo, thus demonstrating to me very solid Roku playback with neither reboots nor LPWs from November 2014 through the firmware crap release in April 2015. We watched Anazon Prime and other Roku channels for a long time before buying Rokus 2 through 6 and saw ZERO EVIDENCE of ANY Ff/Reboots until Tablo suddenly got very sick overnight in April and got worse up to and especially including 2.2.6.

The Tablo 2.2.8. update has SOLVED my Tablo reboot issue for the 2+ days I have been using it. For the first time in 8 months, we can FINALLY watch Tablo on the Rokus without reboots. Occasional LPW’s are a small price to pay for no Tablo reboots as far as I am concerned.

Your opinion is clearly wrong for my specific case, and most likely for others as well.

Blaming the entire problem as you insist on the user configuration, router, and Roku and assuming Tablo does not have an issue is just misleading and does not agree with my observations over the last 8 months. Clearly a real-time workload / congestion issue within the Tablo is playing havoc with traffic delays and creating race conditions occasionally thus resulting in loading, rebooting, and improper file management / deletion. My personal suspicion is that the proccesor is occasionally maxed-out and thus causes unrecoverable latencies for the Roku, a device which itself has no robust tolerance in this regard. My Rokus reboot on other channels as well as occasionally even while navigating the Roku home page, and certain channels do indeed definitely crash the Roku, but NOT in the scrubbing / navigation of the player timeline per FF/Reboot or Direction Left / Right Play.

In my case, it wasn’t FF/Play that caused the reboots as the channels I described (except a few on Sling) don’t allow FF such as Pluto, WatchESPN and a majority of Sling channels. I was just flipping through the content or in the case of WatchESPN, not doing anything - just watching. The Roku went into a LPW and just rebooted. I should amend my earlier statement that it is solely a Roku problem to say that Tablo is not the only channel causing the Roku to reboot.

I absolutely agree! Roku is the least stable / most unreliable player here and crashes for no apparent reason in a variety of ways. Were it not for a very wide variety of prigramming I would have no part of it.

I designed and installed a live streaming video narrowcasting ststem for our local religious organization, and needed a player which carries the ‘Livestrean" channel to be usable by elderly or infirmed members of our congregation as a set-top box since many do not own / use computers, tablets, etc. THe Roku was / is the only such player to support this even now. I supervise and remotely control and view streaming for this Livestream content for which our membership is billed $99 per month. Thankfully the Roku has been very stable but can certainly create LPWs if the transmitting end is too fast or too “lumpy”’. No reboots ever reported by our viewers despite full scrubbing navigation on all of our nearly 100 archived (non real time) programs or in our live streams.

The Roku can and will fail if improperly fed. No doubt it also fails for other reasons as well.

Tablo needed to refine / fix its Roku-sensitive timing and has mostly succeeded except for occasional LPWs.

@Kaizen You’re not alone. This is exactly what I’m experiencing, but unfortunately the update did did not solve it.

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So, I have no problem with the suggestion that ‘Roku has a problem’… but in much the same way that a pot hole is a ‘road problem’… drivers can still steer around the pot hole.

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My 3x Roku 3s were working flawlessly on 2.2.6…so I was a little hesitant to update to 2.2.8. I finished the update this morning, and everything seems good so far. Playback remains solid (No LPWs for 2+ hrs) on 1080p.8mbps, and the schedule grid and recording screens load significantly faster on Roku. My Tablo and all Rokus are on ethernet.

On another note, this was the first firmware update I’ve done where I didn’t have to do some sort of power-cycling to get the Tablo back online. So, that was nice.

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You just suggested such a solution yourself… Programming around a memory leak in Roku…

Considering how my reboot issue (I’m not sure if it’s the only one) is 100% consistent to pressing the select button on return from fast forward… trouble shooting would start with isolating which line of code causes the problem… which should not take too long… as there likely aren’t too many lines of code involved in one button push.

While the isolation in testing might ‘break’ the feature… once isolated… alternate ‘organizations of code’ can be tried. I assume this is a black box scenario where you can make inputs and see results but not what’s happening ‘inside the Roku’… which can take ‘several tries’ to find a combination or sequence that bypasses ‘the pot hole’.

Again, as I’ve not seen ‘this issue’ on any other channel… other programmers have managed to either completely bypass the problem… or reduce it to the point that I’ve not seen it once (vs. multiple times per game on Tablo).

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You will never see any suggestions for code changes until tablo releases the following documents covering both client and server: product requirements, architecture, and high level design. Even a code review would to need to reference these documents.

Since these documents are tablo intellectual properties any product code changes discovered by non-tablo developers would be simple coding errors and not major design issues.

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Seems to me that the entire value of the company… depends on finding a fix to this bug (I would not recommend anyone buy this product until it’s fixed… as it’s more hassle at this point than it’s worth and you seem to think a solution is not possible).

As for the actual fix… because of the severity… (the entire value of the company depending on it, from my perspective)… not only am I confident that a code fix could eliminate (or seriously reduce) the problem… but as Tablo has experience building hardware / software solutions… the solution would not be limited to ‘being forced’ to deal with Roku… as they could build a replacement player. Stripped down to ‘network receiver, player and HDMI port’ could be similar in size to a thumb drive and cost pennies to produce once designed.

As for doing that myself… I don’t work for free. If I generated millions of dollars of value… I would not give it away.

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