Playback error: response code: 502 means what?

What is the meaning of “playback error: response code: 502”?

Very annoying. I was trying to show off to someone the great benefits of the Tablo player. And part way through a playback of a recording of the latest episode of Downton Abbey, the playback crashes and the error message is “playback error: response code: 502”.

What exactly does this error message mean?

@oppedahl - What platform are you seeing this on?

Amazon Fire TV stick

@oppedahl Odd, that shouldn’t be showing up. If this is still happening, can you send our support team a ticket? We’ll take a look and see what’s going on.

I have seen this a few times as well on my Amazon FireTV Stick.

I installed the recent beta update and after about 30 minutes if watching TV received an error 404 on my Amazon FireTV Stick.

I’ve had this error (I think) on my Nexus Player with Beta app. I’ll try to get a picture the next time it pops up. I hadn’t had an error in months prior to that update.

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Got this error today. Beta firmware and software.

I was able to resume with no issue.

@faganm24 Have you seen this since? If you do, send us a note directly so that we can login and check it out :slightly_smiling:

I haven’t watched anything since the other day. It pops up sometimes recently (past month). But always allows me to resume later.

Do you mean a ticket? Or a direct message? I can DM you my information, but you already have it.

@faganm24 Either/or! Last question: were you connected to the Tablo remotely from the Nexus Player when you tried this?

Nope, it was local.

Had another issue again today. Seemed like the same error. I dm’d you, but haven’t heard back. Feel free to contact me with whatever you need to check it out. Happened on an episode of Reign this afternoon (actually 2 different episodes). Recording.

@faganm24 - Had a quick chat with the Android gurus. This is a message that is fired by the NP when it loses network connectivity (and therefore the stream becomes unplayable). We’re working on translating these error messages to English so people actually know what’s going on.

Does that make sense to you? Has your network been a bit sketchy lately? Next time you see this, check on your network status so we can get a distinct correlation.

I wondered if that was the problem. It almost always resumes immediately, but it must be losing the connection.

I have had some issues, but felt them were more issues with the websites I was trying to load versus local network.

Thanks for the info.

NP - sorry for the delay!

NP? What’s NP?

You asked if my Internet connection was sketchy. I’d guess not. At both ends, the connection is commercial (not residential) internet.

It is the same provider (Comcast) at both ends. So there’s no sketchiness due to one ISP having to hand off the connection to a different ISP.

Next time I am playing a recording I will have a ping -t running so I can see if the connection between the two locations is showing any degradation.

I must point out that this is what buffering is for. The Tablo and the Fire TV stick ought to be buffering as much data as is permitted by RAM. This would reduce how often any momentary loss of connectivity would crash the playback.

Oh, and finally, if the problem is a loss of IP connectivity between client and server, then which of these two responses do you think is more user-friendly:

  • crash and burn the session and force the user to close the app and reopen it twice to get a new viewing session, or
  • display “connectivity lost, retrying” followed by eventually continuing playback where we left off.

Right now the Tablo is doing the former.

Tablo ought to be doing the latter.

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I think “NP” means no problem, not Nexus Player…

And agreed on the functionality. I was connecting locally, so shouldn’t be an internet problem.

@oppedahl - Yes, I meant ‘no problem’ in my message to @faganm24

There’s a few different factors for you @oppedahl

First of all, the Fire TV stick may be dropping its connection. The WiFi antenna on stick-type boxes can be much flakier than their box-type cousins.

Secondly, because you’re running in Tablo Connect mode, you could also see this happen if the tuners are taken by the Tablo for other processes (starting recordings for example).

And as for the player behavior, this is unfortunately what we’re able to accomplish with our current player. We are working on upgrading to a newer version which has better handling for network dropouts but as of right now it’s quite sensitive.

Since you do have solid connections on both ends, I would put my money on the stick’s WiFi. Do you have an HDMI device with a hard wired connection or perhaps a more robust WiFi connection? Do you see this type of playback stoppage issue on those device as well?