No thumbnails showing

Recorded Hawaii five 0 last night watching now. During fast forward no thumbnails. Why?

This seems to happen to me every once in while for no known reason. Not a big problem, but somewhat irritating. And it is never due to having all the tuners in use.

It is usually due to some issues with the recording, pixelation secondary to poor signal is the common cause.

Even with perfect recordings sometimes there are no thumbnails (random, we don’t how to reproduce it). Something we’ve noticed.

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I’m a relatively new Tablo user – a week or so – but I’ve noticed that as well…sometimes no thumbnails…not sure if there is a reason or not…

Would be good to know.

I’m sure this is true for many, but in my case the antenna bank is about 8 miles away and 2,000 ft higher - so I get over 80 strong channels Ota but only use 30 on the Tablo. Never a problem with reception or pixelation here. I have 1.5 TB on a 2TB passport and all the shows are perfect recordings. And it is definitely random because on any given evening I will get 3 to 5 recordings and only one without thumbnails.

Here is a question, my guide update and maintenance window is 2 AM. If the maintenance window is entered and there are on going FF frames being generated are they suspended or terminated and restarted. Are any shows pending FF generation started after the maintenance window.

And here is an example. I live on the West coast. At the start of College football season a Saturday lineup would have 12-16 games. I have multiple two tuner units. All with the extend live feature enabled.

On one unit I will stack 2 sets of 4 games that start back-to-back. That means that the games being recorded start at 8AM and end around 11PM with no idle time. I then record SNL which starts at 11:30PM and ends at 1AM. And possibly a move from 11PM to 1AM.

That leaves 1 hour for 2 tuners to process 32+ hours of FF frames before the maintenance window. Will all 8 shows have FF frames generated?

Preview thumbnails take around 5 minutes to process for every 30 minutes of recording in my environment.
The processing begins after the recording completes.
The process requires an available tuner.
The process will fail if the OTA signal is too weak, or if the Tablo crashes, and reboots.

I watched an episode of ‘Judge Judy’ yesterday that had zero preview thumbnails.
Normally, these episodes have the preview thumbnails.
I know the root cause of my issue is a weak OTA signal, cuz even the recordings have pixilation.

You might be surprised about how long it can take to generate FF frames. When the Olympics were on as an experiment I scheduled one manual recording that covered a day’s worth of Olympic broadcasts - 12-14 hours.

Since I knew when the manual recording ended I could measure the time it took to generate FF frames by, at various time intervals, playing the recoding to see if the FF frames had been generated. If the FF frames didn’t exists all I had to do was exit the player, wait 5 minutes, and play again -until FF frames appeared.

Why would image processing to create thumbnails require an Available Tuner?
Doesn’t make sense to me.

Thanks Zippy! Probably just a ‘timing’ issue in my case… Will keep an eye on it!.

Because what everyone here refers to as a ‘tuner’ isn’t just a tuner. It’s a combo tuner/video processor. It does the conversion from MPEG to HTS and is also used to process the still frames from the video that the thumbnail preview uses.

Okay, but still doesn’t make sense. “Available Tuner” seems used consistently to be in regard to 'Reception of TV Signals"

Tuner does not mean “A Tablo” — or shouldn’t. The Images, the Data is stored on the Hard Drive which is connected to a Tablo and yes the stream has to be processed to create the thumbnails, but certainly does not require a Tuner to do so.

As I said, it’s a misnomer. The Tablo has two or four (depending on model) of these “video processing units”. The “VPU” has both the tuner hardware and the transcoding hardware in one logical unit. If the VPU is being used for transcoding, then it can’t be used as a tuner (for some other content) at the same time. So just think VPU instead of tuner when you read these forums and it all makes sense.

Really! Good to know. I certainly don’t know the specifics of the hardware design. So in a ‘4 tuner’ Tablo there are actually 4 Video Processing Units which are integrated as part of the 4 Tuners/Receivers.

Fascinating.

Thanks!

So Additionally… given this design that means that even after a broadcast is finished (i.e. before the thumbnails are created - as described above they don’t show up or are not created until after the recording is finished) the ‘tuner’/VPU would be allocated to creating thumbnails even/for some time after the recording is finished meaning that the ‘tuner’ could not be used to record or view additional/other broadcast programs.

True?

Actually it’s the other way around. Recording (or Live TV) has priority over thumbnails. So if all the VPUs are needed for recording/watching, then thumbnail generation gets deferred to a later time. I think that sometimes these deferred processing tasks don’t get run correctly, which is why you end up with a recording with no thumbnails.

Hmmmmm… :slight_smile:

Another way to think of it is that all the video processing is done by the actual xcode processor. That processor allows either 2 or 4 input video flows. I’ll will assume that for thumbnails the video is processed by the xcode processor and the start frames for the GOP’s are extracted.

Playing up to 6 recordings doesn’t require an xcode flow unless remote viewing requires transcoding.

Uh… you want to try that again in english. LOL! :smile: