I watch several shows on CBS several evenings a week live, using the 4-tuner Tablo that I have. I start watching them at 8 or 9PM, and they’re also being DVR’d while I’m watching them for the times when I miss one or all of them. The transition between the shows is the issue, when the Tablo DVR finishes up the previous show and starts the next one…that process has to overlap, since the DVR will go past the end of a show for that recording, and a little into the start of the next show. So it would need 2 tuners for that, overlapping finishing the previous show, and starting recording the next one.
So what’s happening is that I’ll be normally watching live the beginning of a show while the Tablo DVR is finishing the previous show and starting the next show at the same time. This should be fine, since I should have a dedicated tuner when regularly watching TV shows live. However, my watching the beginning of the next show is disrupted by being thrown out of it, and having to come back in. Like my tuner was dynamically re-assigned to some other task. So I often miss the beginning bits of these shows as I have to back out of the limbo that I’m thrown into by apparently losing the tuner I was using, and having to come back into live TV again.
This seems like a bad tuner allocation scheme to me…the Tablo shouldn’t disrupt live TV watching with DVR activities, lots of tuners for all, and live TV watching should be left alone on the same tuner without being affected by what the DVR is doing in the background.
Is there a workaround for this so that my live TV watching can be continuous like it should be without getting thrown out of shows at the beginning? I haven’t been using the Tablo very long, so haven’t come across a solution for this one yet. Or is my Tablo broken?
I do select off the grid for the first show of the evening, and then off the grid again when I’m thrown out of beginning of a show. I’ll try selecting the channel, haven’t done that one yet.
And I’ll look into a manual block recording…that makes it a little difficult to pick out a particular show, I’d guess smile, but sounds like it would solve the problem.
Bouncing back out to the live tv grid is the standard behavior when picking a specific show to watch. It’s not a tuner allocation issue. If you want uninterrupted viewing, select the channel.
I just tried that, and noticed that if I back out to look at the grid again, the channel box is pulsing red letters after I selected it, like it does when it’s recording. What does the pulsing mean? It isn’t recording, is it? Is that just to show that the channel is selected, I hope?
Ah, I see, makes sense. Now that you mention it, I seem to recall that the grid box had more indication when a recording of that show was being made.
Thanks for your help. Have to wait for Sunday night to see if I get better continuity by selecting the channel, but it does make sense that it would assign a tuner to that channel for live TV if the channel is selected.
If the channel number is red, and pulsing, a tuner is actively being used.
However, a tuner can be actively used without the channel number being red, nor pulsing, so it’s not a definite sign of a tuner’s activity.
Speaking of recording…
The Tablo can record events you choose to save to watch later.
However, the Tablo also records Live TV automatically, to enable you to pause, and RW/FF thru the recorded parts.
These recordings are temporary, and cannot be saved for later viewing.
Happened to me tonight. Started watching a recording that was already in progress, and when the recording finished, and I was still part way through watching, I was dumped out of the show and had to go back and start watching the recording again. This is on the most recent version of the Apple TV app. Seems like a bug to me.
Not sure that I understand what you’re saying. You were watching a recording, or you were watching a live show while the Tablo was also recording? What’s confusing me is “when the recording finished, and I was still part way through watching, I was dumped out of the show”…While you’re saying that you were watching a recording, then the recording finished (that you were watching?) and you were dumped out of the show? Can you please clarify? Sorry, I’m easily confused :-).
I’ve been selecting the channel instead of the shows themselves since the last time this happened to me, and that seems to have stabilized things for me. I haven’t gotten dumped out of the show I was watching since I started doing that. Not convinced yet, I’m a tough sell :-), but this has solved my problem so far.
I haven’t had a problem yet while watching a recording, just while watching live TV while the DVR is also recording.
Agreed, clarification is needed. If you clicked on the grid to watch the specific program as opposed to clicking on the channel on the far left, regardless of whether that program is also being recorded, playback will stop when the program is over.
This is still happening to me when the DVR is recording the show that I’m watching, even though I chose the show that I’m watching by selecting the channel instead of the schedule grid box. I still get thrown out of the beginning of the next show that’s starting, and have to come back in. The last time that this happened,an error window appeared that said that I had lost the reservation to the tuner that I was using. And I had particularly selected the channel rather than the show itself. Took me a while to figure out that this was still happening, but it is.
I’m thinking at this point that this is a pretty bad bug, since there doesn’t seem to be a workaround available. And I’m getting really tired of missing the beginning of shows, where the premise for the episode is usually presented. If I’ve selected the channel, a tuner should be reserved for that channel, and I shouldn’t lose that tuner. I’m really tired of this, and am wondering if this is a problem with the HDHomerun or not. If not, I’ll have to consider switching to it just for peace of mind.
If other people don’t experience this, it may be that I have a broken Tablo, but it doesn’t seem that way since it works fine otherwise.
A small work around is if said show is so important to you that you can’t miss s few seconds of it, why not just schedule it as a recording? Even if you get kicked out of the live TV channel when the previous recording ends, you can always go back to the recording of the new show so you don’t miss any of it.
Or, more directly, stop watching TV shows from the Live Guide. Record everything and watch from the recordings screen.
BTW, you probably “lost” the tuner reservation because the Tablo needed all the tuners for scheduled recordings. Recording takes priority over live viewing. It’s a DVR after all.
Thanks for the responses…still not getting if others experience this? Or maybe others don’t mind?
Interesting that recording has priority over live viewing. The way that I’d design this is to leave the tuner(s) being used for live viewing alone if possible, and just use the ones not being used for live viewing for recording…recording is de-coupled from live use, and will be viewed later. What I’m watching now seems important to me, that it have continuity.
There should be an option, then, to prioritize live viewing, in my opinion. I’m not experiencing a shortage in tuners, there’s enough for everything that we do at the same time, just the allocation of tuners seems wrong to me.
Apparently, if I want to stay with the Tablo, I’m going to have to modify the way that I record. I also have youtube TV, that has lots of DVR space, and I should record the shows that I normally watch there for the occasions when something else is going on. Less recording on the Tablo, too bad, I like having the DVR locally, but I don’t view it as doing a good job in blending live viewing and recording.
Okay, well thanks for straightening me out on that one. I obviously have different expectations than the Tablo designers did.
If you’re watching Live TV on say channel 57 at 745 pm, and then you have a recording scheduled from 8-9 pm on the same channel 57, your Tablo doesn’t use a different / separate tuner for the recording. It uses the same 1 tuner for the recording and your “Live TV”.
I definitely see this, saw it most recently a few minutes ago. If (using my Apple TV 4K) I select a channel that has an in-progress recording (say the national nightly news, which I record each night and keep one episode) ten minutes before the end of the program, when the recording stops (approximately two minutes past the end of the program) I’m returned back to the Tablo live TV grid.
To be clear, my goal is to turn on live TV to see the local news (which follows the national news). This behavior happens frequently enough to annoy other people who are using the Tablo via the Apple TV.
Just got a refurbished HDHomerun Connect Quatro. And will be trying that out to see if they have the same issues as the Tablo. Haven’t set up the DVR part yet, but the streaming looks good so far. The NVIDIA Shield HDHomerun app is a bit dated, but that’s okay, I guess. It’s really the DVR versus watching live TV issue that matters, so setting up the DVR on the HDHomerun is needed. I’ll see what the grass on the other side of the fence looks like.