No thumbnails showing

I guess you will just have to accept that generating thumbnails requires a tuner.

http://www.maxlinear.com/maxlinear-and-pixelworks-selected-by-nuvyyo-for-tablo-dual-lite-ota-dvr/

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Oh I believe that at this point. It clarifies several issues I’ve seen people having in various threads here. And thanks for that link it helps to understand your prior post.

Enjoy!

Just got an email from tablo which is about “Tuner Math”

" One more reason to choose a 4-Tuner Tablo: Tablo also uses a tuner to process the fast forward preview thumbnails on recordings once they’re complete, so having a tuner available at the end of a recording means you’ll have access to thumbnails within minutes."’

https://www.tablotv.com/blog/tablo-tuner-math/

and

So maybe it’s a “one shot” thing, that is, if tuners are occupied when it first attempts thumbnails, it never goes back to try again… maybe that’s what is meant??

It will if you reboot the Tablo. But if there is an error in the stream, the process can still fail.

https://www.tablotv.com/blog/tablo-faqs-why-dont-i-always-see-ffwd-previews/

A “build thumbnail” button or option might be useful, rather than having to reboot the Tablo.

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Let’s say all tuners are being used all day… recording like there’s no tomorrow.
There’s no opportunity for preview thumbnails to generate.

Will the preview thumbnails generate after the nightly maintenance?

The ‘job’ of creating FFWD previews is queued until there’s an available tuner.

Nightly maintenance doesn’t cause or require a reboot, and won’t interrupt a recording so in that case your Tablo would STILL wait for an available tuner to create those preview frames.

Wait, what?
When did this start happening?

“While not a common occurrence, it is possible for Fast Forward Preview generation to fail. This is almost always caused by an error in the actual recording, generally resulting from a degradation in the
Over-the-Air signal during the recording process.”

If the tablo software knows that the recording is so degraded that, even though it plays perfectly, FF thumbnails can’t be generated why doesn’t it place some tick mark in the recording description?

So just to clarify, in relation to @cjcox’s comment, if all tuners are occupied then the first “attempt” would be after one of the tuners is available, so the scenario he mentions shouldn’t ever happen, correct?

Correct.

If you’re missing FFWD preview frames on a recording and it’s had the time and the tuner to process them, it’s more than likely that the process failed because of an error in the file.

Are you guys working on ways to reduce the errors? I probably get 20-25% of my recorded shows with no thumbnails yet the playback picture is perfect. I have a newer 4 tuner model.

I understand the math of the “Tuners/VPU’s” but I am still not getting shows perfectly recorded, with no other tuner being used, some times for 24 hours. For example I work late but want to watch the morning local news when I get up around 9. The Today show is from 7-9, by the math the previews should be generated by 9:10. The first segment is usually 20 minutes long so there is plenty of time to generate the previews. No matter how long I wait they are not ready until the next day. By then the issue is moot. I have tried to reboot and test again but no dice. This just started happening a few weeks ago. Before that it was intermittent. Now it is consistent.

I used to have a Channel Master DVR that had previews generated in real time so they even worked while the show was currently recording so you could do time slip. I switched to the Tablo because I could use any Roku to view the recordings on any TV instead of just the one it was connected to like the Channel Master. This is the main reason I decided not to pay for commercial skip. It hardly worked anyway.

Previews are only generated after the whole recording is complete. Why are you referencing the 20 minute first segment?

What I am saying is the show is 2 hours long. It should take 10 minutes to process after the recording is complete (5 min/hr according to the spec posted by tablo). If the shows runs from 7-9 and I start watching at 9, there are no commercials during the first 20 minutes so that should be plenty of time for it to process the thumbnails when there are 3 other tuners/VPU’s available. If I back out of the program and relaunch it used to pick up and then the thumbnails would be available. That is no longer the case. They are not available for several hours or even til the next day.

So for recordings where thumbnails are not available shortly after the recording is complete (and there are available tuners) when you return to them the next day there are thumbnails available?

If so, can you send along specifics of this (recording name, date, channel) to the support team?

In general, if there are no thumbnails available shortly after the recording is done and you have available tuners, it’s due to errors in the broadcast stream which would lead to no thumbnails being generated at all.

I am located in the Burlington Vermont area and my local channel for NBC is channel 5 (UHF 14) Signal strength is roughly 25-31db. Recording starts at 7am and completes at 9am. At that time there are 3 tuners/VPU’s available to process the recording for thumbnails. After 20 minutes there are no thumbnails, after 2 hours no thumbnails. Sometimes they show up 4-24 hours later. As today’s broadcast showed up when I tried it again at 12:30pm. It is very inconsistent and sometimes they won’t show up at all. Another case in point, Last night I recorded the nightly news on the same channel at 6:30 to 7. I could not sleep last night so I watched it at 11:30pm. There were not thumbnails. I checked it again this morning and they were there.

Tonight I just checked the nightly news on the same channel that recorded from 6:30- 7pm. As of right now at 7:10 nothing else is recording and there are no thumbnails. I will check again later but I doubt they will show up for several hours.