Those are my wife’s words, but I agree with the sentiment.
Watching Sunday Night Football right now and it seems…well “herky jerky” as my wife said. I have also noticed this when watching basketball. I’m guessing it is the speed of the movement in the games, but it does make sports a bit difficult to watch.
Some info on my system:
Tablo is located in my “data closet” in my house and connected to a 48 port 10/100/1000 HP switch.
Theater Room - Tablo app loaded on a second gen Amazon Fire TV that is connected via a wired connection
Master Bedroom - Tablo app loaded on a first gen Amazon Fire TV that is connected via a wired connection
Great Room - Tablo app loaded on a second Gen Amazon Fire TV that is connected via a wired connection.
Office - Tablo app loaded on a first gen Amazon Fire Stick connected via 5ghz wireless
I have noticed this motion issue on each device. Though not listed I also have a Roku 3 that is normally used in our RV so I hooked it up to the theater room television, hardwired, and see the same motion issues on it.
You didn’t say what your settings Max Recording Quality is. Some people like the higher settings for sports - as long as you have the ethernet bandwidth.
The Router is a Netgear R7000. However all the hardwired devices are backended on the HP switch I mentioned above. Basically my network looks like this
Modem > Netgear Router > HP Switch > Various devices
I was watching 1 device at a time. No other streams or recordings happening at the time. At various times my wife was on her laptop checking mail, Facebook, etc…but she is not a big data user by any means.
@shiner
I was told on these forums that the “jerky” motion is due to the transcoding of the Tablo and unless you change the hardware in the Tablo it will stay there.
I find using a direct antenna connection gives a smoother image specially when watching fast scenes such as sports.
I find it better when I activate Auto Motion Plus on my Samsung TV from the input I watch my Tablo on, however it’s not as good as the TV tuner directly.
Thanks Jay. That was my guess as to what was causing the motion issue.
It really isn’t too bad in my opinion, just distracting at times. However the wife does not like seeing it at all.
The Tablo is really starting to fail the Wife Acceptance Factor due to the slowness changing channels and the motion in sports. She’s a big basketball fan so the “herky jerky” motion is not going over well at all. I’m honestly not sure at this point if we will keep the Tablo. It is nice that you don’t have to change inputs to bounce between the Tablo app and Sling TV, but otherwise it isn’t living up to my/our expectations.
In our household we watch less and less recorded sporting events.
Sure, we still record and time slip in some schedule conflict situations but for the most part (and I’m sure advertisers love this) we watch majority of “games” live.
And whenever we watch live TV, Tablo + IOS + gen 3 aTV’s certainly not the device(s) of choice.
A bit, but as they all looked great when using DirecTV I didn’t feel the need to sit and mess with the settings much. What little I did showed no improvement.
I see the same thing on my Fire TV devices - motion is choppy - almost as if it’s dropping frames during playback. And it’s the same when streaming live and recording. It makes sports unwatchable to me - almost enough to make me return this thing. But yesterday, I tried watching via the iOS app on my iPhone 6 Plus, and found that it streams beautifully there - motion is silky smooth, and picture quality is fantastic. So that confirms for me that 1) the Tablo box is doing a fine job of receiving the video and transcoding it, and 2) that my local network is not causing problems.
So I’m hoping this can be fixed with an updated Fire TV app. My overall experience with the Fire TV app is that it’s not very polished (playback sometimes hangs, interactions are slow, and this video quality issue). It’s a shame because the Fire TV device itself is great for everything else I use it for.
I will have to watch via browser tonight to see how that looks. I have noticed the same thing on a Roku though so I’m thinking it is more a result of the video transcoding than it is which device I am watching on.
I read here on these forums that Tablo receives the image in an MPEG2 format, and transcodes it to H264. Now I’m no expert in video conversion formats but I’m pretty sure the effect you’re describing where fast scenes appears to be skipping or w/e is probably caused by the playback of the H264 transcoded feed.
But ofc you can’t compare a 5’’ screen with a 50’’+ TV, almost everything will look great and smooth on an iPhone screen…
If the broadcast is in 720 @ 60 fps and you’re not recording at full quality, this could be a reason why you’re seeing this issue. However, the OP said he was recording at full quality so that shouldn’t be an issue.
Another issue we’ve seen is people having ‘motion blur’ enabled on their TV settings.
This is exactly how the Fire TV looks on my Tablo as well…which I’ve reported (via this forum) to Tablo at least twice in the past few months, but they always say it looks fine in their testing. And it looks exactly like frames dropping (which is what I’ve told Tablo before). My recordings are all 10Mbps, “full quality”…
It’s the only playback device that looks this way in my ecosystem (Roku 3, Roku 4, Fire TV, Nexus Player, Chrome Browser).
I find this interesting, because for me, Roku 3 and Roku 4 have buttery smooth playback of the exact same 720p/60fps sporting events (Fox NFL for example), on the exact same equipment, connected to the exact same router. It is only with the Fire TV that I experience the jumpy, frame dropping playback. It is really un-watchable on Fire TV.