In just the past month our skip feature has started cutting out early and cutting off part of the show we’re watching instead of just the commercial. I contacted Tablo and all they could tell me is the skip feature is active. It always worked correctly in the past.
Commercial skip is not perfect and depends on all manner of ‘signal processing’ and other things that is not discussed in detail. My limited experience is that it can be confused by many things and cause parts of the meat of the broadcast to be seen as a commercial and some commercials as meat. It seems that the actual signal quality from the antenna has a fair amount of impact in the effectiveness. IT would be very nice if the device could give some clues about why the commercial skip failed or encountered issues.
I am not sure that you are saying that the last part of a broadcast is being lost totally or has been included as a commercial. Is the ‘meat’ of the end of the broadcast in the yellow of the final commercial or just not there? It MIGHT be that the station making the broadcast has slipped their times a bit. Our local PBS seems to do this not that commercial skip matters on those – having a pledge skip would be a nice feature, however. If the end of the show is not being records then you should consider adding a minute or three at the end of the recording options.
This will happen 2 or 3 times during a 1 hour show not at the end of the show. The show will skip to the commercial prematurely while the show is still playing. It’s just strange that we’ve never had this problem ever before and it just started in the past month. We do have some shows where auto skip does not work at all for the entire show but we’ve never had premature skips before.
Are these new shows on one of the major stations or older syndicated shows on one of the sub channels?
If the latter, the spacing and/or number of commercials have changed and sometimes the commercial skip gets it wrong. Especially when they put in those long drug ads.
These are current shows. They are the same shows we were watching two months ago and had no problem with skipping.
Commercial skip is imperfect and very much subject to many factors. Poor antenna signal strength seems to play a large part in failures. Antenna signal is affected by many factors including weather. The weather certainly changes significantly this time of year so it could be a good guess as the culprit.
It would be great if the Tablo devices could provide some clues about issues encountered in the commercial skip processing. It does seem that the information is buried in the device as the Tablo Tools app provides some insight. There is a panel in the app that provides Commercial Skip Status which shows a summary of error details.
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