[quote=“RetiredEngineer, post:220, topic:1593”]
Frequency of reboot / crash occurrence:
Typical day ~12 times
Worst day ~20 times
Best day ~4 times[/quote]
Wow I would be a little more than frustrated if I had to deal with that. Is there any chance this could have anything to do with our hard drives? Don’t get me wrong, I believe this to be a roku firmware issue, but I’m trying to understand why it’s only affecting some of us and not others.
My first 2 Rokus were purchased prior to Novrmber 2014 at which time I addrd the Tablo to my LAN. I subsequently bought the 3rd through 6th Rokus over the next 4 or 5 months when everything worked very well, up until the system failed abruptly on the day I installed the Tablo update in April. I accuse (perhaps unfairly) the Tablo update in early April with my subsequent 9 weeks of user frustration and unproductive troubleshooting. I bought a 7th spare Roku 3 in May with the hope and plan that it would come with non-updated firmware and thus could be used to isolate whether the Tablo update rather than the claimed Roku update was the culprit.
Sadly, there was no way I could activate and use this 7th test unit without first allowing the Roku update. The initial activation forces the Roku update. So I now have 7 identical units, 6 actively in service, all failing.
Tonight I did a hard reset on unit 7, put it into service, watched 2 hours of TV with a dozen fast forwards over commetcials, and had only 1 reboot. My reboot rate was definitely lower but still time will tell if it will stay low or return to 5 or 6 times per hour eventually just as it did in May after I also tried hard resets.
Larry
Kyle,
I deliberately bought the specific WD drive because Tablo recommended it. I have several Seagate and Toshiba pocket USB drives sitting here but spent the extra $ to ensure compatibility. No idea why some users are affected and others are not. Nearly 50 years of engineering experience leads me to say that inadequate testing and/or poor (mis)understanding of software APIs and interfaces make much if not most software and firmware released today to be buggy and unreliable. Adding features and deadline driven releases compound the problem. To use the formal software engineering terminolgy coined by Carnegie Melon, at their SEI Software Engineering Institute, the low maturity companies providing products like Roku and Tablo, use ‘chaotic’ processes SEI Level 1 with poor quality assurance. Having personally managed MIL-2167 and MIL-2168 software projects for NASA and achieved SEI Level 4, the differences are enormous.
Yeah unfortunately for all of us, free home entertainment is not as well funded nor important as NASA space missions. That’d be sweet.
4 reboots tonight, more than I would like but still low compared to Roku prior to a hard reset. Once every half hour is livable bud maddening. Feels like I am playing Russian Roulette every time I fast forward…
That’s no fun. It is weird that ALL your Roku 3s have this reboot issue even though they were all bought a different times. Minute changes in hardware can cause issues sometimes. Is the issue as bad on all your Rokus? Or do only some exhibit the issue more often?
My two Roku 3s were bought in Sept 2013 and April 2014, respectively.
We heavily use the Rokus in the “TV room” with a projector at night and in the master bedroom and get less use of the ones in laundry area, treadmill, kitchen, office area. In an hour of viewing on any of them, the crashing occurs at about the same rate however, maybe 4 or 5 per hour of viewing. It was a bit worse before the latest Roku update, and quite a bit better on a recently hard reset unit (temporarily?).
It only crashes with fast forwards. It is otherwise very stable, the video and sound are very good, and really no other issues. The fast forward crashes always occur when trying to resume playing after flast forward or occasionally a fast backward / rewind.
I saw that you have all the Roku’s wired. Have you tried changing one of them to wireless? I’m just thinking that would rule out anything on the wired network causing it. It probably won’t make a difference, but it is one more variable to try.
@RetiredEngineer Here is some ammo for you. This article does talk about “faulty channels” causing freezes and crashes and specifically mentions Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix but it also list issues during FF/RW as a separate issue. Not sure if that means the issues with Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix just happened when video was playing (no FF/RW)?
I will try switching one of my most often used Rokus to WiFi and see how it goes. Thanks!
The article was appreciated and totally confirms my theory to involve Tablo in this problem. As your artivle states, “Netflix had similar issues and have fixed their channel problem. Their Roku channel seems to work pretty stable now outside an occasional regional outage which can happen from time to time.”
The improper use of the Roku APIs CAN AND WILL cause freezing / crashing problems. There is a very simple and technically sound reason why SOME CHANNELS freeze and others DO NOT, namely, poor coding, misunderstood APIs, and insufficient testing under stressing conditions, forcing users to become the debuggers and frustrated victims.
As of December 2014, Netflix had 138 million subscribers. If only 5% of them used Roku, there are nearly 7 million people who potentially could complain of freezing, yet the complaints number very very few since they apparentlty have listened and responded by FIXING THEIR CHANNEL !!!
Recoding just the fast forward key handler might be a good start by Tablo developers…
So I presume that you STILL have not asked Roku to look at the logs for your device? They can tell EXACTLY what was going on at the time of the Roku crashing. That would eliminate the need for you to continue to speculate.
I have had a running dialogue with Roku support including “Escalation” for weeks, providing them with dates and times of crashes. I referred to this escalation in my prior post.
To date, they have provided no useful remedy, suggestions or confirmation that others are experiencing the same problem.
It sounds like they are of the same opinion as I am, that is is specific to your configuration. I am glad to see that you are making a genuine effort to look at potential causes within your particular setup.
About a year or so ago, I was having trouble with my Rokus rebooting. It was frustrating, but I finally found the problem. It was fixed by replacing the Ethernet cable between the Cable Modem and the Router. There were no other problems on the network other than the rebooting Rokus. Of course I had replaced just about EVERY other piece of my network before finding the problem 
Philsoft-
I haven’t seen anything in the replies from Roku to suggest that they agree with you at all.
They made no reference to my configuration as being suspicious, and, to date, have offered nothing to suggest a source of the problem…
I appreciate any suggestions you can offer, but I am completely comfortable with the way my network is working otherwise for the 41 devices which are connected to it.
I’m not sure what your agenda is here, but I find your comments condescending and dismissive, and especially dislike your sentences which begin with “if you are telling the truth” or “are you STILL not providing Roku with crash results”. The combination of your comments suggests, in total, that you have an utter lack of technical insight into hardware design, software design, and how such systems are developed. The reality of the situation technically is that I have a network that had worked properly, including Tablo and all the Roku units until firmware was upgraded, at which point it failed and continues to fail on a daily basis. Do I think it is suddenly an issue of RF interference, suddenly units that need to be refrigerated, suddenly a network cable that needs to be replaced?
The reality is that this system of Tablo and Roku suddenly failed on the day when the firmware upgrades took place, no amount of RF shielding, refrigeration, voodoo, or any other solutions will correct a bug that was created in this firmware upgrade either by Roku or Tablo, and I’m still not sure which.
Could I replace the ethernet cable between my router and my modem? Yes, I could, although my optical network terminal for FIOS is 65 feet away from my router and requires a substantial amount of work to run a new cable. For the last four years I’ve had absolutely no reason to suspect anything wrong with this cable nor do I have any reason whatsoever to suspect something wrong with it now. For items that I do have possible suspicions, such as the router I am going so far is to try three different models
To save myself both further time and further aggravation, I will not be responding to any of your future replies, and I thank you for those attempts you have made to offer constructive suggestions.
Give the new Roku Preview channel a try:
https://community.tablotv.com/t/new-roku-preview-update-new-dialog-and-improvements
That is all fine. Do as you will. I doubt you will get any help that will satisfy you. You flatly reject any notion that the problem might be in your home in spite of the fact that your issues are not affecting the overwhelming majority.
The reason that I mentioned the cable between the modem and router was because I had personally experienced similar issues to what you were describing. Once again you reject that because you want it to be something else. Do you really believe anyone is going to want to offer suggestions when you react to things that way?
You won’t need to worry about responding to my suggestions any longer, because I have no desire to offer any. Good luck.
For me, this build 9 has had no improvement on my reboots. They are still present so I’d guess it will be the same for @RetiredEngineer, but we will see.
In nearly 3 hours of viewing tonight using mostly the standard Tablo channel and a WiFi connection, I only had 3 reboots, a very low number compared to wired ethernet with my other Rokus which were not hatd reset. So far the hard reset and now WiFi have helped for sure. The WiFi adds a very significant delay time to the fast forward process,with messages indicating ‘retrieving’, ‘please wait’, ‘loading’ now appearing all the times I fast forward. Still better than crashes…
Not a real solution but less aggrevating, and hopefully will continue.
Thanks for the help / suggestions and I especially appreciate the non-snarky advice and feedback.
Larry
You said Standard Channel, what about the new Tablo Preview channel on the Roku? Does that cause reboots for you?
Sorry that Idid not state my experience with the new preview channel more carefully. I do not see a difference between the new preview channel and the Standard channel, but really did not give the new preview channel a fair test. I was mostly curious to see how the Wi-Fi switch from hardwired ethernet would work out. Today I will give the new preview Channel a full work out using a hardwired Roku which has not been recently been given a hardware reset.