Tablo Quad recording 4 shows at once Reboots

Support & Troubleshooting
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I must say I’m at my wits end with the Quad I purchased about 15 days ago.

Connected over Ethernet -45dbm signals (5 green) , various internal and external drives.

Firmware: 2.2.26

Problem, try to record 4 shows at 8 or 10 Mbps and the system just reboots, and reboots, you end up with just a bunch of 1 minute fragments of the same show. Odd it runs for 1 minute or close before rebooting.

Record at the recommended 5 Mbps and the system doesn’t reboot, however sometimes one of the shows ends up split screen and flickering.

Being in the electronics field for 30 years or so I’ve cooled the thing way down, running off my $850 lab power supply at the moment. Nothing helps, I’ve tried Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate and WD drives internal and external.

At this point I doubt I can send it back as I’ve opened up the hole in the bottom for a 40 x 40 x 10mm fan. I’ve since removed that as it didn’t help much. I now have forced air blowing on the entire thing keeping it cool.

I even tried a Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSD, same exact issues.

Power, not an issue…tried two 2A 12V power adapters as well as now the lab power supply. It’s drawing ~1.17A currently or about 13 watts peak 11 watts idle.
Heat, no longer an issue. The thing is running around 80F
Hard drives, I’ve tried around 8 drives, nothing changes, no better or worse. Factory reset and setup each time.

Currently it appears to work if I keep it at 5Mbps or below.

Never mind, it just rebooted.

Any logical sound scientific advise would be appreciated.

2

It does sound like you have done a good job of troubleshooting. The only question I have is whether 3 (or fewer) shows at once has any issue. If it is just 4, that doesn’t sound like a hardware issue, and hopefully the Tablo folks can help.

I would advise to open up a trouble ticket with support so that they can take a look as well.

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Are you in the Phoenix area? If so, see the post below regarding split screen and flickering. This might be contributing to your problems.

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I am actually in the Phoenix area, I’m testing right now with 4 shows without CBS in the picture at 10Mbps. Very interesting indeed. So far it’s not crashed which normally would happen very quickly.

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Confirmed, I can record 4 shows at once so long as one of them is not CBS 5 Phoenix. If I try to add CBS 5 Phoenix in the mix I either get split screen, green banding or at higher bit rates reboots in a minutes time or just under.

Not good, my wife loves CBS.

6

Supposedly and according to users (not just @TabloTV), CBS-5 has changed their settings. Hopefully, this will stay fixed.

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Yes, this CBS-5 fix has corrected my rebooting issues. I’m still a bit unhappy that the device reboots when it has problems with One channel, this just trashes all other recordings needlessly. If it needs to reboot it should do so After all other scheduled recordings are done. If a tuner is dead , it should just mark it as dead…record what it can and reboot after it has free time. Just my thoughts.

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Note I am seeing lots of reboots this AM. At first I thought it might be trying to record 3 programs while watching another which was bad enough but then it rebooted a couple times while navigating menus. Coming here I see it might have something to do with 1 of 4 tuners getting an iffy signal which is flat out insane. I say that as a developer since 1983 and and multi TiVo owner for multiple decades who bought Tablo after getting fed up with the downward trend in TiVo gear. Now to find there is virtually nothing I can do for the most basic troubleshooting as well. You had logs but removed them? Seriously? I’m still in my 30 day window and frankly I’m thinking about sending it back.

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It’s true, and I agree.
Not what you’re probably gonna wanna hear, but the only workaround is to get a better broadcast signal.
Going from a flat antenna taped to my living room wall to a chimney pole mounted Antop 400-BV antenna fixed 99% of my broadcast signal issues.
The other 1% were worked around by removing channels that just weren’t worth the trouble.
I mean, I loved watching the Munster’s when I was a kid, but the channel it’s on does not want me to rewatch it. :wink:
It’s been so many months since I had a problem, I can’t remember the last time I did.

Also, true.
I’m a diagnostician, as well.
Just realized I never called myself that before, and it sounds kinda cool.
The removal of access to the diagnostic logs was a gut punch to many.
I get pissed every time someone asks, or mentions it.
Was kinda happy before I read your post, so thanks! :wink:

You may want to do that, but I’m glad I didn’t.
I have 3 Tablos.
All rock solid performance.

1 for my mom, who is 76, and realized years ago that she is not a diagnostician.
1 for me.
1 for my wife.

That’s right.
I don’t share my Tablo.
Get your own.

3 Likes
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Note I’m saying “rebooting” mainly because any program recording is split into segments after the Tablo reconnects.
Also all the issues I’ve seen so far have been on the main 1080i feed of the major networks with good signal strengths as measured on my TiVo.

Looks like the signal issue is definitely not it. For 2 days (Sunday and Monday) it was “rebooting” randomly. In the end it did not seem to matter what what I was doing or even if anything was recording much less what so signal seemed to be the only known issue. The morning after contacting support (Tuesday) I found a show flagged as not fully recorded because of signal loss. I had the same show recording on a TiVo and it did indeed drop out. Note the TiVo dealt with the almost full minute of low signal and kept going.

Support replied: "The recordings broken up into multiple recordings is usually a symptom of an intermittent reception error that is causing the recording to stop, and start again when the signal strength picks back up. This can also be caused by the hard drive on the Tablo losing connection, or the unit rebooting.

Please disconnect the hard drive from the Tablo, reboot the unit, and then try watching Live TV on the Tablo with no drive connected. Do you still have trouble with the Tablo losing connection?

Once you have had a chance to try this out please re-connect the drive to the Tablo, reboot the unit, and then disconnect the antenna. Please try watching a recording without the antenna connected. Do you still have the same issues with the Tablo app?"

Not sure how I am supposed to “watch TV” without the HD unless he means setting there monitoring the feed for reboots with live TV on I have no interest in see. Talk about a insane waste of my time to make up for no log files!

I did notice the unit was REALLY hot while doing the antenna test (which gave the same failed to record due to lack of signal error without reboot). I added a fan above the unit but looking at the temperature logs for the rack (the sensor is very close to the Tablo) the temperature was actually cooler when the reboots were happening. So heat is probably not it either. Still a fan can’t hurt.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly so I added shows to record Saturday. Including shows earlier Sunday morning. This AM (Sunday) the “reboots” are as bad as before. The same shows are being recorded on the TiVo and I can see no signal issues at all. After the second one I switched to the TiVo to let the Tablo set and it still “rebooted”. Trying to watch after recording was finished was still having problems. For instance Meet The Press. It was split into 2 segments, a 31 minute one and 50 second one. Note show is 1 hour. Trying to watch the 31 minute segment via Roku it “rebooted” @ ~16 mins and @ ~26 mins in and then hung at end. Watching it again via the web interface it had a momentary freeze @ ~26 mins in then stopped normally. Temperature logs show it was lowest when the most problems were seen. To me that might indicate an HD issue (though again the diff handling seems odd) but there is 1.63 TB Available of 1.97 TB so I would doubt the same areas have even been written to yet and it is odd that so far the issues only have appeared on the last 2 Sundays and last Monday. I though that might indicate issues deleting recordings as new are added but the extra shows scheduled for early Sunday morning would not fit that either. If there was a way to reformat and or test the HD I’d give that a try but that too is not an option I can see.

My network monitor is only showing a drop during playback as it only records ones longer than 2 minutes. So no help there.

That would seem to only leave a defective device though again the timing would seem odd. Maybe the extra scheduled recordings will shine some light. Again some system logs would probably sort this in minutes instead of all this black box testing.

11

You may want to get a replacement power supply. All 4 tuners going at once may increase your current drain on the existing wall wart, especially if your HD is USB-powered. They are about $10 on the Tablo website. (There are other posts regarding PS issues sprinkled here on the Forum.)

12

I can see that you’ve got an ongoing ticket with our support team. They should be in touch today with some suggestions and next steps.

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