When a scan is performed it would be great if Tablo could…
That way when you right away tell what has changed from what you want.
Good recommendation. Just a heads up, but the Amazon Recast does this. Saves available / selected and all previously selected Favorites as well. You can then scroll through, add whatever new channels were revealed in the scan (if any) and clean up old ones while there.
On my TV it’s called scan new. It takes the existing list and adds only new channels. It doesn’t affect the existing list, existing favorites or existing labels.
That’s all that is really needed.
I see the benefits of this and I see the headaches it can cause. Some people will use this to dial in their antenna for the best reception of the most channels. Move your antenna and compare results. That would be great.
Some might even use a rotor as long as they remember to turn it to the correct place at the correct time. We actually have one channel that has programming during the day I want to record. I was considering using automation to orient the antenna from daytime viewing to evening viewing automatically. I already have everything I need to make that happen. I’ll more likely upgrade to dual antennas.
Some people will just select everything that shows up after each scan. Move their antenna and expect everything to record properly. Since the antenna gets different channels depending on how it’s pointed and the Tablo won’t know where it’s pointing many recordings will fail. If a previously selected channel is left selected a pop up warning stating “The previously selected channels no longer have sufficient signal strength and recordings will likely fail.” The message should probably pop up when the user attempts to save the changes. The pop up should also have the ability to deselect those “bad” channels directly in the pop up.
One more possible issue that can be avoided with good implementation. Scans should detect when a channel has simply been repacked to a new frequency to avoid accidental duplicates.
Ive been asking for this for a while … to be able to just scan new or “lock” previous channels…
It would be useful to have the option of “adding” new channels to lineup without destroying the current channel scan. But this is Nuvyyo, so…
My method of determining ideal antenna orientation/placement is start with a TV that has decent ATSC tuner connected to the antenna line.
Scan using the TV a couple times using different antenna positions. Most TV channel scan menus have a crude signal strength & quality meter.
When you can reach every channel you want/need on the TV, connect the line to Tablo and run the channel scan. At this point fingers crossed your Tablo tuner has similar RF sensitivity as the ATSC TV tuner used.
Otherwise using Tablo channel scan is such a crap shoot, wipes out good scans and takes excessive time with often less than ideal results.
My LG TV has the most complete channel scan and reception measurement I’ve seen. I can scan completely for all channels, scan by channel, create scan and scanned groups, add selective scans.
Both signal strength and signal quality are shown. It is possible to have a strong signal with poor signal quality or weaker signal strength with better quality. I can compare signal qualities NUMERICALLY between channels and see how best to orient an antenna to have the best signal quality for a group of channels rather than just one.
86% signal strength but 45% signal quality is worse than 79% signal strength but 65% signal quality. One can make tradeoffs and compromises this way whereas 5 green dots is meaningless. A strong physical signal is useless if it has a lot of logical reception errors.
Not only does LG show statically the signal qualities but dynamically as the signal varies from moment to moment. It is no use having a 100% signal at 9:01 PM if it dips to 30% at 9:03 PM. I can see both the signal strength and the signal quality over a period of time. It is prefereable to have a signal at 70% most of the time than 100% at one moment and 40% a few minutes later.
With my LG I can measure for consistency and stability over a period of time. The only thing missing is a graph to show a sinusoidal wave pattern of the reception LOL.
What also would be helpful, since Tablo has a phone app, is to have a Tablo phone app for scanning and measuring reception. Would be wonderful up on the roof or in the attic…
Improving the channel scan is something we talk about frequently, and these are all elements we’ve discussed.
If anyone has any other recommendations, please share them!
Should be able to add several improvements to the channel scan in the software.
Yesterday I decided to run my weekly Sunday scan thru the Tablo Preview app on my Fire Stick. I usually do this thru the phone app. After running the scan I was thrown off because all of the channels I have selected were still selected. I hit the scan button and watched the screen to make sure the process completed. It did and sure enough my regular channels were still selected. I was even more surprised to see that other channels I don’t want were not selected.
I thought this was just a feature I missed. But after reading this thread I’m not sure. @TabloTV Is this a fluke?
Granted this does not cover all the wishes related to channel scan. But this fixes the biggest on my list of not having to remember what I did and did not have selected before the scan.
It could be that our ‘recommended’ channels are the ones you want to keep!
We won’t pre-select SD channels or channels with poor reception.
@TabloTV that is how I understood it. But one of the channels, CW 9-2 w/480i, is one that is always unchecked after the scan thru the other apps. Isn’t 480i SD. It stayed checked after the scan thru the Tablo Preview app.
On the other side, TELE 9-3 w/720p, is in Spanish and not part of my regular lineup. But after a scan thru the Tablo app on my phone it’s checked. But thru Tablo Preview it was not after the scan.
I’m going to have to try the scan again when I get home to make sure I’m not imagining things.
I find the “recommended” channels business fairly annoying since I like to add many of the SD channels and I don’t need or want some Inc telling me which channels to enable in my lineup.
What I “need” is practical channel signal metering.
Just because you perform a scan doesn’t mean that you are required to replace the current channel list with what was found.
How often are new channels discovered? There will be some rescanning required during repack. But it’s easy to determine a range of dates when repack will occur in your area.
You won’t have to worry about ATSC 1.0 SD sub-channels. Most all of these will disappear when the main ATSC 1.0 channel moves to the lighthouse channel.
So I ran a scan thru the Preview app and after the scan it remembered what I had previously selected, did not remove any selections regardless if it was HD or SD, and even better, it did not automatically select anything.
Next I had two channels that had the single red dot. I selected those and updated the lineup. Went to the guide and verified the new channels were listed and waited for show info to populate. Went back and ran the scan again and there were no changes to the selections. Even the red dot channels still had checks.
Finally, I removed the check from my two always solid channels, which are HD, and updated the lineup. Verified they were removed from the lineup on the guide. Went back and ran the scan again. After it was complete, there was again no change to the selected. The two red dot channels were still selected. And the two HD channels I usually have checked did not have the checks on them.
Hopefully someone else who has the Preview app can test and see what results they get. At this point I’m wondering if this is a bug (which I don’t mind since it is not changing my selections) or an unrealized fix to the retain selected channels after a scan feature request.
I am testing this on a Gen 2 Fire TV Stick. The Tablo Preview app version is 1.4. Tablo is original 2 tuner and running firmware 2.2.22(1820613).
Why don’t you run the scan using the Chrome browser on a PC and see how that works.
This works well with the preview app, the exact same as with the Android TV app (I think they’re the same app). I often toggle back and forth between the two, can’t find any discernable differences.
I don’t know. I guess I’m not explaining what I am seeing very well. My point is one feature request I have seen several times when it comes to the channel scan is that the original channel selections not be changed.
The discernible difference is on the original Tablo app after a scan, channel selections are changed to the “recommended” channels. The Preview app after scan did not change the original channel selections to the “recommended” channel. Therefore preserving the original lineup. Which is a good thing. Which is the feature request fulfilled. But it doesn’t appear that it is seen by anyone else. I’ll just enjoy it while it last.