Because I’ve always had intermittent “small spinning circle” problems I finally got hold of a 50ft cat5 cable and hard wired the tablo to my router. A bit of a safety hazard with a loose cable running across the floor and up the stairs but seemed to have fixed the spinning, pausing issues i kept having.
Last night … started to get intermittent small spinning circle and pausing all over again, even when hard wired. Rebooted the router, & the Roku … same thing.
Is it possible that it was connecting via wifi even throught it was plugged in? When I unplugged the cat5 from the Tablo, the behavior was exactly the same. For the last week the Cat5 connection allowed me to watch without any issues.
Is there a way to ensure the Tablo is connecting via the cable vs. wifi?
To properly switch from WiFi to Ethernet (or vice versa), plug the Ethernet cable into the router, then Tablo, and then reboot the Tablo. Once its blue LED has stopped flashing, it should be connected to your network via Ethernet.
If you want to double check, you can log into your router to see which devices are connected and how (via WiFi or Ethernet). Alternatively, give our support team a shout and they should be able to help with this.
@TabloSupport: could you consider adding a more complete network status in the Tablo Settings section?
Tablos have to network interfaces: wifi and ethernet. Yet, the About section only shows one IP and one Mac. Also, when playing with both interfaces, we have to guess which interface is active.
A proper interface would show something like this, which would show all the details and also which of the two interfaces is the primary one in case both are connected.
Wifi interface
MAC address: 11:22:33:44:55:66
Status: Connected, primary
IP: 192.168.1.100
Ethernet interface
MAC address: 11:22:33:44:55:67
Status: Disconnected
IP: N/A
It’s documented… wifi is not active while a cable is plugged into the network port – no guess work. Plug in a cable, wired connection active, unplug cable wifi capable
What is documented is the expected behavior, but what happens when network issues arise? how to you debug this? In my case the router was out of IP in its DHCP pool. The Ethernet cable was plugged in, but didnt have any IP assigned to it. What’s supposed to happen? Its not documented and the UI doesnt show any information.
The fact that the behavior is (partially) documented is no reason for an incomplete / ambiguous user interface. The tablo has 2 NICs, it should just display the status of both. Anything else is just confusing.
And having to reboot a system to apply a network configuration change is counterintuitive. No modern system has this requirement. One more reason to make the UI explicit about this - relying on the user to look into the documentation to find out about this unusual behavior is not a good practice.
Right. Tablo doesn’t go much beyond basic, home “non-technical” user.
What’s suppose to happen? Sadly, in these unfortunate issues… contact support. Yes, myself and many users including you could understand a lot more… but I guess tablo doesn’t want to overwhelm their primary demographic.
For the most part, when you get it working, I hope you find it works great despite some "short comings"
