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.