Tablo is working with Roku. Now wait.
Or buy a Fire TV box for the wait, then sell it after.
So I had a Roku reboot last night on Showtime Anytime - when I FFWād. Exactly like Iāve been seeing with Tablo. Someone else mentioned that a possible reason the issue seems Tablo-centric is that you donāt FFW much in most Roku apps (which is true for my usage)ā¦so Iāve come around to believing there is a deeply rooted issue with Rokuās firmware regarding the reboot issue.
And I do have Fire TV as well, so like @theuser86 said, that can be considered a work-around for the time being (but I hope Talbo fixes the Fire TV 720p/60 playback quality - many frame drops).
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Time will tell where the problem came from, assuming the resources are applied to resolve this. Given that Tablo needs apps for Roku, Fire, Android, iOS, Chromecast, and web browsers, I sm frankly concerned that they may not have Tablo in-house app developers, but instead subcontract the 6 apps to independent contractors. Each platform requires a lot of unique expertise and if I were managing software development in a small company I would likely vote to outsource. This makes bug correction a very very lengthy process compared to in-house staff. It also makws the role of Tablo acting as a āmessengerā hoping for a fix by Roku much more plausible. If people were emloyees on staff, the Tablo channel app would be looked at in the last 7 months for possible bugs.
Iām pretty sure they use in-house developers for the Roku app.
I hope so. We had contract programers help get some things done, but when they left we had a new project called contract cleanup.
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I have seen that too many times 
āIām pretty sure they use in-house developers for the Roku app.ā
Why do you think so ? Just curious.
Just from the way TabloSupport and Tablo TV talk about the developers splitting time between Roku, Fire TV and other feature requests.
You could be right, but it is extremely odd that such Tablo in- house developers for Roku have not done a single maintenance release on the channel app since February 2015. Usually a working staff delivers a bit of code now and then. I realize that a Preview app beta has been shown, but in-house developers never leave a code base untouched so long, particularly in a new product cycle. My developers were making maintenance releases on 10+ year old code every month or two, if for no other reason than to look busy!
Could be that their Roku channel app developer has other duties.
Yeah my thought was the same developers were solving the Fire TV issues and all the new issues with the most recent firmware update.
@theuser86
āYeah my thought was the same developers were solving the Fire TV issues and all the new issues with the most recent firmware update.ā
You may be right about Tablo having an in-house Roku programming person or persons, and if that same person also designs and writes Tablo firmware, then the total lack of any maintenance release to the Roku channel app since February could be explained perhaps, although not excused.
If Amazon Fire users are getting buggy code from Tablo needing re-work as you suggest then it could overwhelm one person as well.
I guess the true staffing / outsourcing strategy is mostly irrelevant in the final analysis since the real issue is whether sufficient resources are being applied, and all evidence including the untouched old February code and my 9 crashes tonight certainly suggest otherwise.
Agreed, I have been one of those contract programmers, and I prefer having someone in house directing the project priorities, and ideally function as lead developer. It tends to mean that the questions get asked before the contractor leaves with the domain knowledge. It avoids some of the cleanup, or at least makes it part of the contract work, and leads to happy customers and repeat work.
I just got my Tablo a week ago, and really bought it to time shift football games. I am on current Roku 3 firmware, and Tablo software. I had 9 reboots during one football game, and always after skipping forward then OK or play. I have only had two reboots of my Roku in the previous year, so it was sort of strange to see that many times.
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I have 2 tablos wired to the router but use wifi 5g to my 4200 roku 3. I only record at 720p. While I use to have a fair number of re-boots, after the roku firm update to 6.2.3672 the reboots were reduced. With tablo firmware 2.2.2 the re-boots were even further reduced.
This weekends newly recorded 8 football games only had 3 re-boots. Even older recorded programs have had reduced re-boots.
So I donāt think the problem remains consistently bad for everyone.
My reboot situation also improved, not with firmware updates from Roku or Tablo, but after shortening the Ethernet cable between Tablo and router from approx 70 feet to a couple feet. At its worst I had reboots dozens of times each day. I am now down to an average of a few per hour, an improvement for sure.
I have used 7 different Roku 3 boxes on many different channels. On all the other channels I have very occasionally seen a freeze, an unexpected return to the home screen, a loss of sound, and other issues, maybe once every few days or once a week. I have never had a fast forward reboot on any other channel except Tablo. And my Tablo worked absolutely fine from around October until April, and then suddenly went very bad with ffreboots. The configuration including 70 foot Tablo to router Ethernet cable was fine until the unfortunate coincidence of new firmware from both Tablo and Roku. Hoping to see some improvement here but 3 Roku firmware updates have provided no solution.
@luker swapped his rebooting Roku with another Roku 3 from Tablo and his issue disappeared and Tablo now has a bad Roku for testing. This shifts the attention to Roku as the more likely root cause but does give Tablo an opportunity to reproduce and possibly fix the problem. This swap did not occur until around month 5 so the whole debug process has been glacially slow.
Thankfully Roku has a lot of other channels to watch.
The Roku Preview Beta works on my Roku LT but the Roku Preview channel doesnāt.
Just to chime in hereā¦
We do the vast majority of our programming in-house and have a few contractors that are mostly dedicated to us as well so theyāre basically on staff but just donāt sit in our office.
Our Roku team published updates in April, May & June and another one is currently in QA so they certainly havenāt been idle.
We have been working actively w/ Roku on the reboot issue but unfortunately all investigations seem to be pointing towards a Roku firmware issue. We are trying to utilize what pull we have at different levels (marketing, dev etc.) to get this resolved because we realize how annoying it can be but there doesnāt seem to be a magic bullet that we can do ourselves that will make it go away.
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Has anyone noticed if the reboots happen more or less with a micro SD card inserted or not? I donāt have a micro SD card and occasionally when I go to a rarely used channel my roku loads info. Indicating to me that it is at the memory limit. Would an Sd card help? Anybody get reboots with an sd card inserted?
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I tried an 8GB microSD card with no improvement. I have reduced my total Roku channel apps down to 10 hoping the additional available memory might help, but did not achieve any improvement.
The Roku 3 recognized the inserted microSD card, formatted it for Roku, and certainly knew it was installed. No help in my experimenting here and suprisingly no signs of any speed improvement in any facet of the Roku which I could perceive.
@TabloTV
" Our Roku team published updates in April, May & June and another one is currently in QA so they certainly havenāt been idle."
Thank you for providing more detail. Is there a Tablo channel app for Roku 3 more recent than the February 2015 release? I know that beta Tablo Previews were released with program guide grids, but have not seen any Tablo channel apps other than Version 1.1.3. Dated February 9, 2015 on any of my 7 Roku 3ās.
Could those of us being badly impacted by this bug possibly be allowed access to any beta release to see if we can help Tablo localize this problem ? It has appeared to me and maybe others that Tablo did not have in-house evidence of this problem until @luker swapped his crashing Roku 3 with one of your non-crashing Roku 3ās a couple weeks ago. With such a nagging and recurrent daily / nightly problem, it would be great if we could assist Tablo directly just as beta testers do with Tablo releases of firmware for the DVR box.
Thank you for your assistance.
Larry
Channel 2.0 build 13 is the one I have that works on the Roku LT. Channel 2.0 Build 9 is the released version of the Tablo Preview Channel, which does NOT work on Roku LT.
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