@CycleJ I’ve been having some issues with my Tablo locking up over the past couple of weeks. It becomes unresponsive (can not connect) until the Tablo device is rebooted.
I submitted a ticket but I’ve been trying to troubleshoot why it’s locking up on my own and it seems to happen when I’ve been watching a show that is actively recording / or was recording and just finished.
Do you think it could be possible that Tablo Ripper (really ffmpeg) is attempting to download the show but a file is locked on the Tablo because I am currently watching it on my Roku?
Is there possibly a flag in the metadata (or API call for all active viewings) that shows when a recording is being actively watched (so that it could be skipped, similar to incomplete)?
You (and probably everyone else) should always check the “skip incomplete” option.
That option tells TabloRipper to ignore recordings that aren’t marked “complete” by your Tablo. While is show is in the process of recording, this flag is set to “incomplete”. And once it completes successfully, it’s reset to “complete”. If a recording is interrupted, it remains “incomplete”.
Enabling this option will always ignore “incomplete” recordings. But you can still rip them manually if you want too. But you can be sure that TabloRipper won’t try to rip a show that’s in the process of recording.
Here’s the deeper dive: Are you using the latest (version 2.x.x) of TabloRipper? If you’re still on an older version (1.x.x) you’ll want to upgrade. Why? Newer versions of TabloRipper use the new/improved Tablo API which handles load balancing (the old API doesn’t, and it’s possible to swamp your Tablo with API requests). Older versions of TabloRipper try to be “gentle” with the older API, but it’s still possible it (and other clients using the older API) could overload your Tablo.
Thanks for the reply. I’m on the most current version of TR. I always have the box checked for skipping incomplete recordings.
I know that TR skips the incomplete in my setup but if TR attempts to download the recording at the same time that it is being watched through an app, could it be possible that ffmpeg crashing the Tablo device? That’s why I asked if Tablo possibly has an API call that TR could look at to see what is currently being watched and then skip that show until its not.
Good question. FFMPEG is directly accessing the URL to rip the recording, so it wouldn’t be throttled by the Tablo API (either new or old version). Unfortunately, I don’t see a way for TabloRipper to tell that a different client is accessing the same recording that’s being ripped.
This case is one reason I have the background service obey the time window you specify in TabloRipper settings. If you configure it to run while you’re sleeping (and your PC isn’t busy) you shouldn’t have conflicts.
I haven’t been able to get the new API to crash my Tablo, but I haven’t tried watching the same recording while ripping it.
I noticed that a few recordings that don’t have season and episodes aren’t getting deleted from my tablo or saved on my plex drive.
These are recordings that will have the date and time appended to the file name. It appears to only happen when the show airs twice in one day. It looks like when the time stamp is appended to the file name the Month appended to the filename instead of Minutes.
I remember noticing the odd times a few months ago but thought there was something weird with the Tablo clock. The recordings were all okay so I didn’t really worry about it.
If you could look at this at some point, I’d appreciate it. Thanks
Question - are you running the current version? If not, could you upgrade and try it again?
If that doesn’t fix it, please tick the “Enable Logging” option, try to rip at least one of them, then disable it again and send me the files located in “C:\ProgramData\TabloRipper” using a PM.
Could be a bug, or just something I haven’t seen before. Let’s figure it out
I’ve got a bit of a wacky question. I added the Rio Olympics as a record all per the wife’s request. As a result, a lot of stuff is being recorded right now, none of which I want to have Tablo Ripper worry about moving over to my Plex setup. Easy enough, was going to add it to the Exclusion filter.
What I noticed is even though I set it to record via ‘Rio Olympics’ in the Tablo app what is happening is the Tablo recordings don’t have Rio Olympics in the title at all, the episode titles are just the events. Because it can be varying sports in each ‘episode’ I would have to keep adding all sorts of stuff to the filter each day.
Is there some way to get around this granted very specific and very short-term issue as far as being able to exclude it from Tablo Ripper activities? Right now I’m just confirming she’s watched what she wants each day and I go in and delete the episodes before Tablo Ripper runs overnight.
I’m a fan of wacky questions, but at first glance I’m not seeing a way to tell that a recording is actually “Rio Olympics”. I looked a a couple of the descriptions in Tablo, e.g.“The U.S. men’s volleyball team faces 2012 Olympic bronze medalist Italy in a preliminary-round match.”
The problem being if I exclude recordings, it’s probably not safe to search for the word “olympics” as a trigger.
If you can think of a way to safely distinguish those recordings, I’ll give it a try?
That’s exactly where I’m stuck, since nothing can be assumed consistent in the episode title or description I can’t think of a way you could easily identify just those items.
I mainly wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. I’m a recent Tablo purchaser so still learning lots of things but in the ‘behind the scenes’ data is there something like a program ID that Tablo stores with each episode that could be used to identify all the episodes being from one program?
How do you feel about beta versions? If you’re “in”, then download the latest beta (2.1.5) from the link in post #1. There’s a new option to “exclude sports events” from the “new recording” list.
I haven’t tried it (no recordings to test with yet), but it could work.
Valid point. If the beta version doesn’t work this is a totally valid workaround. Threw it out more just to get us thinking about other situations that may come up in the future.
2.1.5 successfully installed. I did a manual Foreground Start with Exclude sports checked and it returned 'No recordings were ripped." so that’s a good sign. I’m going to let it run overnight as part of my normal ripping since I’m assuming that’s the way most of us use Tablo Ripper and I’ll post results in the morning.
While the recorded Olympics were not ripped to my Plex setup neither was the ‘normal’ TV episode that was recorded last night. I was able to manually rip the ‘normal’ TV episode from last night this morning with no issues. I had logging enabled so I snipped the portion from overnight last night. Is there somewhere I can send the log file?
Is there a way I can configure Tablo Ripper to use the “Auto-delete more than X episodes” feature and not process anything at all? That’s the only feature I want, but it looks like it has to process every file with FFMPEG even if I’m not planning on ripping anything and it just keeps getting stuck over and over again with a “FFPEG is stuck - please try this recording again later” which makes it impossible to just run as a service in the background. Is that possible? Thanks!
Don’t have an option for that (yet), but you should be able to specify a bogus “selection” filter that’ll fail to match any/all of your recordings. For example, something like “DON’T RIP ANYTHING” in the selection filter should do the trick.
I haven’t promoted the beta (the only version with AutoDelete), but it’s almost ready for prime time.
