Thank you for posting. Your questions are certainly worth asking and I am grateful to you for thinking about this. You are quite right that for some users, the choice of wifi rather than wired ethernet could end up being an explanation of reported problems.
You couldn’t have known because I did not mention it until now … but this same Fire TV stick with its wifi connection somehow manages to stream HBO Now and Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime and CBS Now without a dropped packet. And Food TV and HGTV and PBS online, again without a dropped packet. This same Fire TV stick with its wifi somehow managed to stream the entire Super Bowl (see https://blog.oppedahl.com/?p=1296 ) without a dropped packet.
Yet when the time comes for me to play back a Tablo recording, I get these 502 and 404 errors with no tidy recovery of the error condition.
My home is geographically distant from any other sources of wifi. So interference from a neighbor’s wifi is not likely to be the problem.
The favorable results with HBO Now and the eight other non-Tablo sources suggest several things. It suggests that the wifi environment in my home is probably not the problem. It also suggests that the “last mile” from my home to the Comcast CMTS is probably fast enough and probably not unduly congested.
Yes if I were seeing flakiness with HBO Now and the eight other non-Tablo sources, then I would agree with you it would make sense to try a non-wifi approach for feeding the HDMI port on the television. For example a Fire TV box instead of a Fire TV stick. This would, of course, require getting in a car and driving 75 miles to transport the Fire TV box so that it could be in the same room as the Tablo. And then driving 75 miles back to plug the Fire TV box into the ethernet and into the television. But since the many other sources seem to stream with no problem, I think this Fire TV box experiment is unlikely to make a difference.
The Fire TV stick is dual band and has dual antennas and can do MIMO. My wifi access point is also dual band and has three antennas and can also do MIMO. They are five feet apart, not across the house or anything like that. So my best guess is the wifi communications channel is good enough to do the job.
Nonetheless next time I am playing back a recording, I will keep a ping -t running to the IP address of the Fire TV stick to see if it shows any impairment.
@oppedahl Thanks for the additional info. The ping will definitely help to identify any network-related issues.
One more question… What recording quality are you using? Both for recording, and the remote playback. More bandwidth means there’s a better likelihood of overwhelming the device’s network stack.
And while Netflix etc can provide a good baseline for the overall quality of network streaming in your home, it’s also a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison with Tablo.
They have the luxury of creating multiple streams at multiple bit rates so if your network suffers a bit of a blip, they just ramp down the quality for a few seconds or minutes. Tablo doesn’t have that ability and will send a consistent feed of what you’ve asked it to send so it may uncover some deficiencies that might not be seen with other services.
Hopefully this gives you some data so we can take a scientific approach to understanding exactly what’s happening for you.
I recently upgraded to 8 Mbps 1080 since I am not using a Chromecast anymore. That may be part of my problem, but I’m running a AC1900 router, so I didn’t think that would be an issue.
Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed comments.
For me the challenge is to see whether the Tablo can provide picture quality that is comparable to that provided by Directv and its DVR. When I dial down the streaming bandwidth or the recording bandwidth, there is the fairly predictable result of a noticeably fuzzier picture compared with the Directv and its DVR. For example streaming at 4M yields a fuzzier picture than the Directv yields.
But in answer to your question, I have been recording at maximum bandwidth – 10M. When watching a recording, I have usually been streaming at 4M or FQ.
The Tablo is a four-tuner device and I am pretty sure I have never asked it to play a recording at a time when more than one thing is being recorded. So I have probably never used more than two of the four DSP channels in the Tablo. Said differently, about half of the bandwidth in the Tablo has probably only rarely if ever been used.
As for the bandwidth of the Fire TV stick … if it is so nimble that it can juggle multiple streams from Netflix, I would hope it could keep up with a single stream from the Tablo. But sometimes the SDK for a given platform will be less than ideal. You folks at Tablo probably have your own frustrating experiences coping with the various SDKs for the various platforms.
Hey guys - Are you both using the the beta app? Can you try deleting the beta and instead use the production app from the Play Store/Amazon Store? We’re trying to reproduce here, but if we can rule out the beta app vs. the beta firmware, that will help us track down where the issue is popping up.
I detailed this in my initial trouble reports. But no, as I have explained in at least two previous postings, I am not using the beta Tablo app on the Fire TV stick. I am using the production app, version 1.0.25.