Do we have any Tablo subscribers in the Tucson, AZ area??? If so, can you please respond so we can discuss an issue between one of the local channels and the Tablo.
Thanks very much
Yes I am a new Tablo subscriber in Tucson. I have been having a unique issue with the recorder viewing recorded shows. The recorder consistently drops and we are unable to watch recorded shows. We thought the issue might be heat as the device is in a closet with all of our other electronics we have placed a fan in the closet and are leaving the door open however this has not resolved the issue. Checking all the devices they do not seem overly hot so do not know what to think. Everything we buy lately fails for one reason or another within an unacceptable period of time and does not matter one bit what we pay for it. I was hoping this was the solution to cutting the cord but looking like it is not gonna be as I do not find it fun to spend a large amount of time when I want to watch tv to figure out what is wrong with the new $300+ device I just bought.
Thanks for responding to being in Tucson. Sorry to hear you are having so much trouble with your Tablo. I bought the Dual Tuner model almost a year ago and had initial problems with the box and overheating was one of them. My Tablo is sitting in the bottom of my TV cabinet along with the modem, router, switch, and my 2 GB external hard drive. Yes, the heat was causing a lot of issues in bad recording, dropping signals, and also buffering issues. What kind of antenna are you using for your reception – one mounted outside or one on a wall? Once I stood the Tablo up on its end and put a small fan in the bottom shelf behind the Tablo, the heating issues went away. If you haven’t already, you might want to go to Tablo and ask for assistance directly or ask for a new unit. One of the main reasons I asked for responses was to obtain verification from other Tucson Tablo users over an issue I am having with KGUN – Channel 9 – ABC. Don’t know how long you have been using Tablo, but since March we have had issues with any national sports program broadcast by ABC/ESPN on Channel 9, like the NBA games, Indy 500, and other major sporting events. Once the broadcast goes to the play-by-play announcers, the language shifts to Spanish and since Tablo doesn’t have SAP, you can’t shift it back to English. However, all the preliminary portions, commercials, and half-time programs are all in English. I don’t know if you have experienced this issue with your device or if you watch any sports on Channel 9. There is an upcoming NBA championship game on Channel 9 later this week and I would greatly appreciate if you could briefing watch a portion of the game (after the game starts) to see if the play-by-play is indeed coming in Spanish on your unit or is it something in my box. Also, while watching Channel 9 between the hours of 4 PM and 7 PM, we also notice a lot of periods starting commercials or even the start of shows where the audio won’t start until about 5 seconds after the video. Any yes, when I swap the antenna from the Tablo to the tuner on the TV none of the issues exist. Tablo says it is a Channel 9 issue and Channel 9 says it is a Tablo issue. I just need confirmation from another local Tablo user that maybe I am not the only user with the problem. Thanks very much!
We could not even pick up ABC 9 when we set up the Tablo we recently did a re-scan and got the channel. I do not watch much live TV so do not know about the issues you were having. I have a few small open weave boxes I will try putting the Tablo unit on one of them to see if that helps. We have the antenna connected directly to the Tablo the Antenna is in the house against a wall we did give some thought to putting an antenna on the roof but figured we would try the set up first to see if it worked. I am not real happy with the whole thing it takes quite a bit of messing around to get things right. We have an audio sound bar and if we wish to use that we have to get out of the Tablo set-up as the remote button to assign an audio device will not work while we are in Tablo. If you want to change to Netflix or Amazon you have to go through several commands I thought getting the Amazon Fire Stick would make that better but it has not. My 91 year old mother lives with us and the whole thing is just way over the top for her lol she just wants cable back. What day and time is the game on sorry do not watch sports but I will try to see if I get the same problem as you.
Ann
Ann — The next NBA game on Channel 9 is this Sunday at 6 PM. Would greatly appreciate if you could watch about two minutes of the play-by-play to verify if your audio is coming in Spanish. A good time would probably be around 6:15 pm. Would greatly appreciate it! Comments – An indoor antenna sometimes is not all that good as advertised. On a good day you can pick up most of the channels, but then sometimes they will fade away. We have an antenna mounted to the side of the house at the roof line. We pick up 22 English-speaking channels and probably another 20-25 Spanish channels where we are south of Tucson. I think you would enjoy Tablo much better with a more reliable reception. We also use a Fire Stick (both 2 Gen and 4th Gen), however, the 4th Gen stick has some issues with Tablo that Amazon is working on, so stay with the 2nd Gen stick for right now. If you are using the regular App for Tablo on the Firestick, I would recommend you also download the Tablo Preview App and try it. You will find it loads a lot faster, but has all the same options as with the regular Tablo App. Yes, my wife had the same issues in getting used to the Firestick and going back and forth between the Apps, but she got used to it very quickly. Totally agree that cable or satellite is much easier for the older generation like me, but the cost of cable and satellite was just was too high. Let me ask you another question – do you have the Tablo connected directly to your router or are you using the Wi-Fi option? Let me know what you find out on Sunday with KGUN. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Thanks - Elby
07/21/2018 - I am located west side of Tucson. Cox IP, Roku, 4 tuner tablo (2.2.20), Indoor antenna. Same problem with ABC (KGUN). I actually pick up signals from the Tucson Mountains and from the Catalinas. I have tried both with the same issue. I receive the SAP signal. This results in spanish commentary on national sports and Descriptive Audio on national broadcast shows (Prime-time sitcoms and dramas). No problems when going straight from antenna to TV. Everything works as I would expect. CBS and NBC work fine. Wondering if it is a Roku issue or Tablo issue. Are you going straight from Tablo to TV?
Thanks for the response. Knew their had to be someone else with a Tablo in the Tucson area. The other Tablo owner never got back to me on the audio issue. My configuration is similar to you as I am running the Tablo using an App off of Roku for the past 45 days. Prior to that we were using an Amazon Fire Stick. We have a 2-tuner Tablo (ver 2.2.20), Cox IP, but we have an antenna mounted on the roof for better reception. Like you, this issue is only unique when the antenna is connected to the Tablo. If I switch the antenna from the Tablo to the tuner on the TV, the problems go away. Please notice I said ‘problems’! This whole mess started in March and was okay prior to that time. Have checked all the software/firmware releases for Tablo and Amazon (back then) and nothing coincided with the problems starting. Yes, it is very irritating as whenever we watch any national sports program on KGUN, we get Spanish when it is time for the play-by-play and Tablo doesn’t have a SAP alternate switch to go to English. At the same time, we have noticed during the time period of 4 - 6 PM Mon-Friday we experience periodic delays in the audio when KGUN switches to a commercial (primarily a local one). We have noticed about a 5 second delay in the audio starting for the videos. Only notice it during this part of the day. Also issues with the Descriptive Audio when we watch anything on KGUN. Lately they have been putting storm warnings a lot between the hours of 4-5 PM. We get the scroll at the bottom and also the computer generated audio voice that blocks out the audio on the shows (Who Wants to be Millionaire and Jeopardy) until they stop the alert. Very annoying as we have no way to stop the audio channel. I have addressed this issue several times to both Tablo and KGUN. Tablo says it is a KGUN problem and of course, KGUN says it is a Tablo problem. I did have an open ticket with Tablo on the issue. Kind of hard to put the blame since the issue the audio issue is only present on KGUN and only when the signal is routed through the Tablo. Kind of leaning that it is a KGUN problem. Thanks.
A little added information from Tablo on this issue when I had a ticket open. They also accessed my hard drive on the recordings I save for them of several sports program on KGUN. They reply was: Hi Elby,
What we believe is happening is that the broadcaster is switching their audio stream mid-broadcast (which is a non-compliant with standards).
Since then Tablo has to transcode and record the video, it’s not able to switch back and forth between different audio tracks. A television wouldn’t have an issue here, since the television isn’t able to record the video coming in from the OTA signal.
Thanks,
David
Customer Success Manager, Tablo
Monday-Friday 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM E
elbyj…I always thought that KGUN was the budget station of the three network channels broadcasting in Tucson. Do you think the Roku could be causing the problem? I wonder if a Roku TV or AppleTV or Amazon Fire Stick user experiences the issue in Tucson?
elbyj, David’s comment “A television wouldn’t have an issue here, since the television isn’t able to record the video coming in from the OTA signal”. I wonder if you use a TIVO Romeo OTA dvr with a TV if that combo would have the issue? I’ll try to look up a TIVO blog to see if I can find anything.
The issues started when we were using the Amazon Fire Stick. We hoped by switching to a Roku the problem might go away, but it didn’t! We really don’t want to go out and buy an Air TV box or another piece of hardware just to see if the problem still exists. The common denominators in this whole issue remains Tablo and KGUN! I can see KGUNs point in saying everybody else in Tucson is receiving the audio signals okay, except for two owners of a Tablo box in Tucson. I am going to try it again with KGUN and hopefully they will see my point now that I have two homeowners with the same issue. I am still leaning that it is a KGUN problem, but to get them to admit it is another thing. I know we have several homeowners with Cox cable TV that have told me they complained to KGUN about why the audio and video tracks appear to be off just enough to be noticeable.
TerrainCrawler. Below are two email chains I had between Tablo and myself concerning the issues in receiving KGUN/ABC/9-1 in the Tucson area on Tablo.
Sep 5, 7:04 PM EDT
Sorry I took so long, but I needed to record some items which would show the issues. Yes, I just placed our Tablo back into the remote mode as you requested. The files you need to look at are as follows:
1 – Jeopardy – Tuesday -August 28th. You will notice the audio does not come on with the video for commercials as there is about a 5-7 second gap. This will appear at 5, 15, and 25 minutes into the program at the start of a commercial break. Please note that this is recurring on just about every Jeopardy show on KGUN/ABC/9-1.
2 – College Football. There are three different shows recorded all from KGUN/ABC/9-1. These were all recorded on September 1st.
(1) The first game has a record time of 12:30PM to 3:30PM. You will see the Oregon State versus Ohio game. Since this game was considered a regional broadcast, the play-by-play for the game was in English. As I found out during this past weekend, the play-by-play for all the regional college football games were in English.
(2) During the first game ABC/ESPN switched from the Oregon State/Ohio game to the Washington and Auburn game which was considered a nationally broadcasted game and was in progress at the time because of apparent bad weather. But you will notice the play-by-play for the Washington/Auburn game was in Spanish and all commercials were in English.
(3) The second recorded game (Miami/LSU) has a time of 4:37PM - 7PM, however, only 27 minutes of the game is recorded since we experienced a power outage for about one minute. After the power outage Tablo immediately started recording again and that is the reason for the second part of the game. You will note that the play-by-play for the game is in Spanish again since it was a nationally broadcasted game and the commercials were all in English. However, one of the other issues with KGUN-ABC/9-1 is also captured in this segment of recording. At 33 minutes into the recording you will see a local weather warning appear on the screen and scrolling with start at the bottom of the screen. When this happens on this channel the computer generated voice for the weather warning is blocking out the audio for the current show. You will not hear this computer generated voice on a normal broadcast since it supposed to be for the visual impaired, yet we are hearing it. This also works the same for those family orientated shows on ABC where they have the separate audio channel for the visually impaired. As you well know we do not have the capability with Tablo to screen out this audio track.
As the present time we are subscribing to Hulu that has our local channels so we can record shows on KGUN/ABC/9-1 and watch the sports. However, this is $40.00 I would prefer not to spend just to watch one channel on Hulu. Going with a splitter on the antenna feed direct to the TV turner works great also, but we loose the recording capability. As I mention recently, I did send a long email to KGUN reidentifying the problem, but I have never received an reply.
Thanks for any help you may give us,
Tablo Support - David (Tablo)
Sep 6, 2:03 PM EDT
Hi,
Thanks so much for taking the time to send this over with all of the details. Today, we managed to take the reports you sent over and go through some logs and recordings on your Tablo.
Unfortunately, we concluded that we are not able to work around this particular issue at this time. This is due what we’d classify as non-compliant behaviour in the PSIP data coming from the broadcaster. Some details are below.
Effectively, the broadcaster is switching streams mid-broadcast - this does happen occasionally, and isn’t a major deal. The root cause of the problem is that the broadcaster has mis-labelled at least one audio track as ‘English’ when it is in fact ‘Spanish’.
A standard television would likely be able to work around this problem as its own audio and video decoders don’t require transcoding. The Tablo, however, needs to transcode its audio and video at all times so that it can send it to the Tablo apps and devices like the Roku. For this reason, the Tablo can only select one audio track.
Because there are multiple audio tracks, and at least one of them is mislabelled, this is why you’re getting the wrong language feed, and why sometimes you get audio for the visually impaired - and other times, no audio at all. It’s all from the same channel listing incorrect audio information in their PSIP data. At this time, we have no way of working around this. This would have to solved directly from the broadcaster’s end. Our recommendation is to pursue the broadcaster with this issue.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
David
Customer Success Manager, Tablo
Monday-Friday 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM ET
So, I will try again in sending something to KGUN, but since they didn’t reply to me after my email to them two weeks ago, I highly doubt they will respond. Don’t know if you have been able to get in touch with KGUN about the issues.
If KGUN doesn’t respond and\or resolve the problem, here is another, low cost solution. Rather than spending $40 a month, buy an iView or Homeworx receiver\recorder for $30. Split your signal between Tablo and this DVR. Use it for just one channel - KGUN. Since it records the native MPG2 stream and doesn’t do any MP4 transcoding, you will get the good, normal, standard audio feed not dependent on PSIP data. Not an optimal or integrated solution but inexpensive and not a recurring monthly cost.
The Homeworx has antenna in and signal out ports (which passes along the original antenna signal to any device connected via coax to a Homeworx). Connect the antenna to the Homeworx and the Tablo to the RF output of the Homeworx thus avoiding a splitter.
As a (Tucson based) Multi-year Tablo 4 Channel Tuner owner (and lifetime guide subscriber), I too continuously have KGUN-9 audio issues. Voice Descriptions (for Sight Impaired Individuals) are an ongoing failed experience when playing back ABC (KGUN-9) recordings on any of our four (4) Amazon Fire TV (Boxes and Cubes) devices. In regards to real time Tablo Streaming today, ABC (KGUN-9)’s audio feed is in Spanish.