Tablo cannot be found occasionally - misses recordings - needs reboot

Support & Troubleshooting
29

Nope.
I thought rebooting it every few days would keep it running stable, but it’ll crash and reboot itself, or freeze, so you need to power cycle it, even if the last time you purposely rebooted it was less than 24 hours ago.
Drove me crazy trying to figure out steps required to make it crash, or freeze, so I gave up.
Living the happy dream of oh well, I’m saving money, and it works well almost all the time.

Crud, just remembered there is one thing that makes a huge difference in stability.
Only use excellent signal channels.
Using anything less than perfect signal channels is asking for trouble.

30

Many thanks. I’m in the same boat; happy I’m saving money from the cable empires. It’s worth a few headaches that I’m sure they’ll fix eventually. Thanks for the tips!

31

Don’t hold your breath!

I am the original poster and that was nearly 2 years ago in Feb 2015. I have another bug now 3+ years old.

Tablo does not neccesarily fix bugs or even acknowledge they exist…

32

Any updates for this issue. I have a 10-day old 4-tuner that has done this twice. I’m about to return it to Amazon. I wonder if the HDHomeRun hardware is any better with a Plex subscription.

33

No rebooting issues here since May 2014. Get Amazon to exchange your unit.

Or give Plex DVR a try - big limitation now is you can only schedule recordings from the website interface. Not the Plex apps on say your phone or tablet.

1 Like
34

I opened a support ticket and after logging into my Tablo, I got the following response:

We managed to review your Tablo’s logs and confirm that a firmware failure resulted in a brief period of inactivity. We intend to address this issue in our next firmware release - coming soon. Would you like us to add your Tablo to the upcoming firmware beta, so that you can get early access to this upgrade?

Anybody has any experience with the Tablo support folks? Are they pretty much on the nose when dealing with issues like this? Thanks.

35

As the originator of this thread 2 years ago, the originator of numerous other threads reporting Tablo issues, and a harsh critic of Tablo’s treatment of software / firmware quality or lack thereof, I offer the following opinion:

Tablo has very responsive, courteous, and very capable and well-intention people in their support and technical ranks, trying really hard to please customers and solve problems.

My opinion, strongly expressed here previously, is that only partial success in achieving satisfactory outcomes, due to (again, my opinion) over-reach in trying to fulfill too many goals and trading excellence for sales volume. Trying to support many player platforms (AppleTV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Nexus, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android…) with the diverse programming environments they require has resulted in coding errors galore, some of which have persisted for YEARS.

Adding to this is a very uneven pattern of denial / lack of ownership of these issues, often blaming the user, dismissing the legitimacy of the complaint, etc. Nothing is more irritating than an employee or sycophant stating: "I am not experiencing this issue and therefore, (implying) the problem is user-created.

Years of complaints and thousands of posts on this forum substantiate user frustrations, and THANKFULLY, the Tablo has reached a level of performance and reliability which in recent times has become very good.

I would personally encourage new owners to hang in here and work with Tablo support folks, since the baby with severe colic has become a pretty attractive young adult with few if any significant flaws. The people are great, and the product is mostly excellent.

Larry

4 Likes
36

Is Tablo male or female? :no_mouth:

37

Surely female!:grinning:

38

Monthly downtime…

39

I’ve been dealing with these issues through two devices. I originally bought a refurb. After blaming my hard drive, and my signals, they sent me a replacement that one worked for about a month. Now I sometimes come home fire up the Roku and find no Tablos. I trek down into the basement to find the hard drive light on solid, normal for no activity. Then I may find the Tablo’s LED lit or dark. In either case, the blue button on back has no effect and I have no option but to power cycle. If I look at the router logs, the Tablo will have stopped renewing its lease some time ago.

Support has always been pleasant, but I’ve not gotten a resolution yet.

Playback has been “skippy” on all devices since the first time the replacement locked up. Tablo support says low signal is causing the 1 to 30 frames to be dropped from the recording. I have five green dots on every channel, other than the second set of PBS channels I can pickup, but don’t use. I can see the marker lights on the TV broadcast towers at night from my backyard. Channel “11” comes in on the TV without connecting anything to the F connector, a couple others show up but are unwatchable. Most channels are watchable if I connect the home coax to the TV but not to any antenna. I have a RCA 18" log periodic antenna mounted on my amateur radio tower above tree line. The Tablo is connected to the first two way splitter. Signal should be 3dB down from what comes off the yagi. I put a small indoor amplifier on it anyway tonight.

40

Since you apparently have extremely strong and direct broadcasts, with reception not requiring any antenna whatsoever on channel 11, and physical line of sight to the towers from your property, you should not encounter dropped frames on this channel unless you have some very strong multipath from reflective surfaces between you and the transmitter tower. This should be very apparent if you connect your log periodic directly to your TV input without a splitter and without Tablo.

Even if signal strength and signal quality are creating problems for you, this in no way should cause your Tablo to disappear from your network and require rebooting. All logic tells me that your Tablo is defective if it worked properly for about a month (as you say) and then began disappearing from the network.

To the extent possible based on your network topology, I would connect the Tablo as close to the router as possible using a very good quality ethernet cable, avoiding intervening IP hardware such as switches/hubs etc.

I use twoTablos here, each with an antenna pointed towards different population centers/towers. Depending upon the length of the RJ-45 ethernet cable connecting each Table to my router, and the quality of the ethernet cable (I am now using cat 6), I can provoke problems in stuttering, lease renewal issues, dropouts, etc. One of my Tablos (a 4 tuner) is definitely more finicky than my other unit, a 2 tuner unit. The dependency on the length and quality of the ethernet cable could very possibly be attributable to a marginal ethernet transceiver chip in the Tablo.

My advice, for whatever it is worth, would be to run short, reliable RJ-45 cable to your router directly from your Tablo. If the disappearing Tablo persists, I would request a replacement unit.

In several years of use with a relatively complex environment here, I have never seen any reason to associate weak signals/poor signal quality with the disappearance of the Tablo from the network. these are two independent and unrelated issues as far as I’m concerned.

I would add that hard disk drive compatibility has in the past been a real issue for me, and that using Western Digital passports entirely solved my earlier problem in that regard.

One other cautionary comment:

Adding an amplifier at your antenna output can create problems in the presence of very strong signals (channel 11) . Since you are apparently a ham radio operator (I’ve been licensed since 1957), you’ll appreciate that Intermod and 3rd order intercept performance of these amplifiers (particularly the low cost models) can wreak havoc with ATSC Digital television signaling.

Larry

41

The dropped frames are on nearly every channel. But the main problem is settling in to watch in the evening and finding that I have to hike down to the basement and pull the power plug. I can deal with picture issues. I grew up 80 miles from the nearest broadcast station. I watched a lot of snowstorms. I can deal with digital artifacts.

My Tablo being defective is what logic tells me also. However it is the second Tablo with the same issues. That makes me wonder about design flaws or programming errors.

My Tablo is sitting on top of the rack mounted router. The USB drive lays on the router’s aluminum case and the Tablo sits with the RF side on the drive, the power side on the router. There is room for a lot of air flow. I’ve used the ethernet cables supplied with the units and one of my own, currently 2m long cat5e, handles GigE quite well with my l laptop. I do a lot of networking at the day job. It’s not like these things are actually moving 100Mbps. With one client watching, usual for us, I see intermittent bursts to 14 Mbps. While fast forwarding, it can go much higher, but skipping frames is the point while forwarding… The router shows no errors on the ethernet. If I had shell access into the Tablo I could check from that perspective.

I don’t associate weak signal with the lockups. I suspect the underlying problem is causing both issues.

The drive is a Seagate Expansion Desktop 4TB. I did some research before buying it. There were reports of it working well with the Tablo. Maybe the reviews were wrong.

Yes, I’m worried about overdriving the tuner. I happened across the amp tonight. It was in a box, leftover from a former house. I installed to be able to tell support definitively that signal is not the issue. I know the amp will increase noise as well as signal. If I thought it was an actual signal issue, I’d mount a larger antenna, instead of using an amp. Most broadcasters are on the same ridge 20 miles from me. Two channels are on a tower 48 miles from me. According to TVFool.com, signal levels are predicted to be -50 to -29 dB. That’s pretty hot.

Maybe I’m overdriving the tuners without an amp and that’s messing with the recording? 80% of the symptoms are missed syllables. I’m usually looking at the computer while “watching” the more “interesting” parts of the shows. There are visual defects as well. But they happen less often than the audio skips.

73

42

Two experiments you could try:

Use Tablo Ripper to pull some files from your Tablo and play them in your laptop with VLC. See if they are dropping frames, or if they are good recordings only corrupted in subsequent playback on your Roku.

Also, drop your recording bit rate down in Tablo Settings. Your current 14 Mbps traffic sounds like you are currently at the high end; try the lower rates. See if the low bit rate recordings play properly via VLC.

Also, both my Tablos get their Ac power via IP-controlled power outlets so I can recycle them remotely. I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago and toggled power from my hotel room using my iPhone at my Tablos near Buffalo NY…

I used to use 3GStore 1-outlet IP switches but now have WeMo Belkin outlets (@$25/apiece)

43

I do.
My Tablo tuners get stuck on weak signal stations, and eventually cause a reboot, or freeze.

Symptoms were…

  1. Live TV repeats the last few seconds of the broadcast.
    A tuner is stuck when this happens, and won’t be released until the Tablo is rebooted.
  2. Pixelation during Live TV, and recordings.
    While this could be caused by hard drive issues, or the Tablo overheating, it’s usually a weak broadcast signal.

Removing the weak signal stations dramatically decreased these issues.

44

And it happenned again. I went on vacation and Tablo hung after ~5 days. Third strike. I really want to like this product, but a DVR that doesn’t record shows blows. Support’s response that this is a known firmware issue is appreciated but, ultimately, flawed. I work in support and this is what we call a Sev 1 issue. A problem like this deserves its own patch ASAP, not make customers wait for the next generally available update. I’m returning mine to Amazon. Not sure what I’ll do now since the Tivo solution is not as good, or as affordable. Thanks.

45

For the second time this week my tablo has come up as not being found. Wife was watching tv and she got the message the tablo could not be found.

I am not home yet, so I can’t reboot it.

I als cannot connect via the app on my iPhone. It gets to the guide but won’t connect.

I am also going to place it in the side tonight and see if that makes a difference. If anyone wants to remote in, let me know and I’ll put the device in remote access mode.

46

Given this particular problem, I wound up putting IP-switched outlets on the AC power adapters for both of my Tablos, allowing me to recycle power/reboot from my iPhone when I am either home or away.

I originally used relatively expensive switches sold by 3GStore.com @ $79 apiece, but I’ve had equal success with a much less expensive switch is made by Belkin, called “WeMo” for $29 apiece.

Note that remote access, once it has failed, cannot be established remotely, since the iPhone and Tablo need to be connected locally via Wi-Fi/LAN in order to reconnect.

However, Tablos which cannot be found on the network can be rebooted and re–paired locally, restoring proper recording and playback. From remote locations via the WAN, rebooting will restore recording functions but no remote playback.

It sure would be nice to have a login account method of access / re-pairing like Nest, Belkin, Logitech, and most other WAN remote devices.

Larry

47

I stopped at home and rebooted the device. I was able to access the tablo on the iPhone on my home network. I did notice the audio was off like a Chinese karate movie watching through the app though. I hope that does not happen with regular tv later on when I check.

Will try tv when I got home later. I hear you on the remote rebooting. I am just thinking and hoping this is not a larger problem.

I’ve turned the device on its side as well.

Also, when I got home, the device had no blinking blue light or anything. Like it had died during the day. Once I plugged it back in, it came back normal from what I can see.

More to come…

48

Well regular tv is performing well. Sync issue is not happening.

Will keep an eye on he losing connection cannot be found issue now that I’ve turned it on it’s side.