Saga of little used gen 4 that would not open

General Discussion
1

I have two gen 4’s, a 2 tuner and a 4 tuner. I used the 2 tuner to archive a tv show or two and don’t check it often, just every few weeks to a couple of months.

This morning I tried to open this 2 tuner using Roku, and it went to the sign in screen and declared itself unseen by my network. I could not get out of this screen by punching any button on the Roku remote, though I could get back to the Roku home screen. Then I would see the sign in screen again, and was not able to open either tablo.

Basically the same in the IOS app for gen 4, but when I tried to open the 2 tuner, it told me to scan channels, with a bar indicating it was already 75% complete with the scan (even though I had never started one). Never seen this before.

Thinking that a channel scan would cause even more problems, I first experimented with router and Roku reboots, and power cycling Rokus. Also force restart of ipad. No change. Then I did the channel scan on the 2 tuner, from the IOS app, and it completed except no channels were selected; I had 15 selected ( same number of chans on each Roku)before this all started.

After the channel scan,the 2 tuner started working normally again, and switching between the 2 and 4 tuners was even very fast. Problem solved, but I have never had this problem before and it came out of nowhere. I found that in spite of showing no channels selected after I did the channel scan, the 2 tuner has in fact been recording and archiving, for the last month, most but not all episodes of the tv show I had set it for. I am thinking about deleting them al land starting over.

Before decding to do the channel scan, I tried to open the 2 tuner using my backup ONN puck, and found it acted pretty much like the IOS app, except there was no screen to tell me to do a channel scan.

Along the way there were other unfamiliar things, such as a screen telling me that my Tablo could not be found in the network, and I could click to try to connect again, or click to disconnect, which would mean I would have to connect to a different Tablo, so the screen said. Very confusing.

I am wondering if the fact that I open up my 2 tuner so infrequently caused these problems; OTOH I have been opening the 2 tuner only every few weeks for prob a year, and there have been no issues of this nature. Also as far as my 4 tuner, which I use every day, no issues to speak of for the last 4-6 months.

2

I hope you got this worked out and you’re back up and running.

3

Yes thank you, both tablos were working again after I did the channel scan on the lesser used 2 tuner. Though I have no idea why that tablo on it’s own seems to have unselected all of my channel choices, and then told me to scan again when I tried to start it up.

Not gonna worry about it; but I was reminded of the frustrated posts we have all read here where users are rebooting, factory resetting, etc to no avail, after their devices start acting goofy.

I did enough of that in my first tablo months, and later found out the issues were mainly due to flawed Roku and/or Tablo updates. Then we had a time of server outages.

I came to adopt the policy of doing nothing for at least a few days, and often the issues seemed to work themselves out. I’m not a really heavy tablo user, but I see how people who are, or people who are perhaps the typical customer, and not technically inclined, could get really frustrated by these hiccups.

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