Playback failed on well-played recordings

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Been having this issue on a couple episodes that my 6 year old has watched multiple times but I’m seeing it more often now on other episodes.
Basically, we’ll select an episode for her that we’ve selected and played about a hundred times before but now we’re getting a ‘Playback Failed’ error message.
Is the hard drive failing? What’s going on here?
Thanks
Apple tv 4
Tablo Dual Lite
2tb western digital storage

2

It could be a failing hard drive, but unfortunately hard to tell for certain. If it keeps getting worse I’d see about moving to another drive before full failure! If you search the forum there are procedures (written by users) on how to migrate data from one drive to another.

If you power-cycle the Tablo does the error remain?

Maybe try a different power supply too (Tablo sells them for $12).

3

Thanks @mbellaire . I perused some of the migration posts but by and large they seem to pertain to PC.
I’m in a Mac household.
Any ways to migrate via Mac?

4

I don’t have a Mac so can’t advise you on what tool could be used, but any good disk migration tool should work. You’ll have to disconnect the drive from Tablo, and then have both the new and old drive connected to a Mac or PC to do the migration. It may take hours!

Whatever tool is used has to support EXT4.

5

Is this reproducible on the same recording - but on different devices? For example, if you always get this error on your Apple TV, can you try paying the same recording on the Tablo web app at http://my.tablotv.com/? Do you get a similar issue when using the browser app?

6

It happened on a different device as well. Tried playing through the suggested my.tablotv.com and had problems there as well.

7

If the same (previously functional) recordings are failing to play on any/all Tablo apps, it does sound like this could be a drive problem. Our team can help confirm this for you, just send them a note.

8

Is there a way to move the recordings to a new hard drive (using mac)?

1 Like
9

Take this with a shaker of Salt since I do not own a MAC.

But it appears there is a ext4 driver for the mac (google search). And it looks like the MAC has the rsync utility.

So in theory you can connect the new drive to the tablo power it up let it format the drive, power it off.

Connect both drives to the MAC.

Install the ext4 driver on the mac and use rsync to copy the contents of the old drive to the new. Assuming the MAC rsync utility works the same as the linux/unix rsync. You should end up with an exact file by file copy.

They also suggest using vbox or some other virtual host software and a linux client.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/381278/how-to-mount-ext4-disk-on-10-15

1 Like
10

Thanks @andersonas25 . I’ll give it a try

11

Before copying - rsync allow tablo to format the new drive!

Anther option maybe Clonezill Live. Allow it to grow to the new size - it’s been so long I don’t recall just now. It’s been posted here and here and in Clonezills’s FAQ.

In this example: Clone small disk to larger disk

12

Got stuff moved over to a new hard drive via Mac.
Here’s how I did it…

  • Formatted new hard drive by connecting to Tablo Dual Lite.
  • Downloaded a program called extFS for Mac by Paragon Software so as to mount a linux formatted drive on a mac.
  • Old drive was corrupted pretty bad so it took a while for ‘extFS for Mac’ to mount the old drive but eventually it did.
  • With both drives mounted on the mac I opened my copy of ChronoSync and did a mirror copy from ‘Left to right’ (old drive to new drive). NOTE: There were a few errors during copying and I skipped most of them.
  • After about an hour and a half it copied everything.
  • I unplugged the Tablo, plugged the new hard drive into Tablo, then plugged Tablo power back in.
  • Went to recordings and played. They worked!

Here’s what I don’t know yet but will test and report back here…

  • Will previously scheduled recordings still record?
  • Recording/pausing live TV. Is that working?

Again, I’ll test these out and report back. My guess is if they DON’T work, it had something to do with the ‘errors’ I encountered (see above).
Hope this helps somebody.
Thank you for your input and help with this matter everyone.

13

Good news. Thanks for the detailed process, it may help someone someday.

14

Schedule and guide data is not stored on the drive, it’s internally on the tablo so there should be no impact. Good luck with everything

15

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