Strange behavior

Support & Troubleshooting
1

I have scheduled NFL games. There are so many of them that I have found myself disabling some. Today I discovered a conflict but was just a little too late.

I deleted the recording of all the NFL games that were to begin recording at 1:00PM BUT I turned off the scheduled record at about 1:08PM. And then I enabled the record of my desired program.

Then I went to watch another program that I wanted but there was a message that a tuner was not available.

Then when I checked that program a second time the message was Player error weak signal. Checked on my TV set and found a perfect picture.

So I went to a second physical channel on the Tablo and got the Player error weak signal message again. A third physical channel reported the same error.

I exited the Tablo app completely, pressed the blue reset button on the Tablo Dual, and after a delay I reopened the Tablo app. That had returned the Tablo to a known state and operation returned to normal.

It appears that:

  1. Stopping a scheduled recording after it has begun to record does not seem to mark the tuner available in the Tablo.
  2. When the Tablo recognizes that an error has occurred but does not recognize the cause or gets confused about the cause, it just reports Player error weak signal.
2

Let me replace my previous comment.

I have scheduled NFL games. There are so many of them that I have found myself disabling some. Today I discovered a conflict but was just a little too late.

I deleted the recording of all the NFL games that were to begin recording at 1:00PM BUT I turned off the scheduled record at about 1:08PM.

Then when I enabled the record of my desired program there was a Tuner not available message.

And when I switched the Tablo channel to something else that I wanted to watch, there was a message indicating Player error weak signal. Checked on my TV set and found a perfect picture."

So I went to a second physical channel on the Tablo and got the Player error weak signal message again. A third physical channel reported the same error.

I exited the Tablo app completely, pressed the blue reset button on the Tablo Dual, and after a delay I reopened the Tablo app. That had returned the Tablo to a known state and operation returned to normal.

It appears that:

  1. Stopping a scheduled recording after it has begun to record does not mark the tuner available in the Tablo.
  2. When the Tablo recognizes that an error has occurred but does not recognize the cause or gets confused about the cause, it just reports Player error weak signal.
3

That isn’t normal behavior. I just tried to recreate your problem on my Dual Lite, and was unable to do so. I was able to cancel recordings that were going on and start new ones with no issues.

  1. Record channels 4 and 5 at 11:30 AM.
  2. At 11:32, verified that I can’t tune to another channel or start another recording (no tuner available)
  3. Cancelled recording on channel 4
  4. Started a new recording in current time slot for channel 2 (success).
  5. Cancelled recording on channel 5.
  6. Started a new recording on channel 4 (success)
  7. Verified that I can’t tune to another channel or start another recording.

So everything was working correctly for me.

Update: I also tried deleting the recordings while they were being recorded, and encountered no issues.

4

@snowcat

Interesting. Looking for possible differences between my experience and yours, I see:

  1. You have a Dual Lite and I have Dual 64GB but I am using a WD Elements external drive. When rescanning I always get 5 green dots on all channels. I am using ethernet cables not WiFI.
  2. Both the NFL football games which were being recorded had been ‘scheduled’ automatically after I clicked on Record for all NFL games back in September. (Not individually)
  3. I stopped both recordings at about the same minute but did not delete the recorded 8 minutes of either of those football games.
  4. Then I quickly attempted to start a completely different recording. (Got Tuner unavailable)
  5. After that, the Player error weak signal on 3 different channels happened on a clear day with great reception.

You never received a Tuner unavailable message, so there was no test of the Player error weak signal weirdness.

The Tablo could have already been in some unusual state, but it has been acting perfectly normal. No problems at all.

I just assumed that I had put the Tablo into some unusual state with my stopping those 2 scheduled recordings and quickly attempting to start another record.

Whatever the problem was, resetting the Tablo cured the problem.

5

Hey there, sorry for the delay on seeing this. Have you been able to reproduce this behaviour since rebooting the Tablo? If so, we’d love to connect with you in a PM to see if we can get the logs from your unit.

6

I have not tried to reproduce the problem yet. Been kind of busy.

Would the logs from 4 November still be in the Tablo?

7

Today I tried to reproduce this problem in several ways but I could not.

There must have been some prior event which left the Tablo susceptible my experience. (ie. reporting ‘Player error weak signal’ on 3 separate physical channels.) Channels which have a strong signal and which the Tablo had no problem with AFTER I hit the reset button.

8

@TabloTV ‘Player error weak signal’ seems to be the go to generic error reported when a specific error message is not available, which makes it very challenging to figure out what the real problem is.

9