What does it mean when the blue light dims repeatedly?

I was watching an old recorded program when Tablo started reloading and went back to the menu screen. After several times, I reset the Tablo and got further into the show, when the show was dropped again. I pressed the reset button and unplugged the power cord. I powered down the Roku and the router. Then powered up the router, the Roku and then the Tablo. Everything worked well from that point. The Tablo and Roku are connected to the Router via eithernet cable. It did not seem as if the connection was lost because when the Tablo returned to the menu all the other functionality was okay. The problem was just with this on recorded show.

The blue light on the Tablo was fluttering while this problem was occuring. I don’t say it was flashing because it did seem to go on and off as much as it dimmed up and down.

I assume this was a communicaton issue but because this was one of my first recordings. I also considered a disk issue because it was only for this one recorded show. I have a 3 T Passport drive.

About 2 weeks ago my Tablo froze and when I pushed the reset button, I held onto it for too long. When it rebooted, the recorded programs were there but some of the scheduled listing were missing and I reentered them.

Just curious what might have been happening.

  1. Which Tablo do you have? What firmware version is it running?
  2. The slow blink (1 per second) means either your Tablo rebooted and it was starting up, OR the Tablo lost connectivity to your router. Read the link below for what the blinks mean.

The light never seemed to go out and I only had a problem with this one recorded episode. Light would flicker and the recording would drop. The light would continue to flicker when I watched other records but there where no other problems watching other programs. After recycling the router, we were able finish watching the problem recording. The problem has not reoccured. I am just curious about whither it was a problem with the recording, the disk drive or possibly a communication issue. Nit picking but still curious.

Well if it doesn’t happen again, you’ll never know why.

How old is you unit. Mine did this before the power supply went south. It was ~about 3 yrs old.

1 Like

About a month old. I will add power supply to my list of possible issues.

@Neil0214 - If you touch base with support, we’d be happy to take a look at your Tablo’s logs and get to the bottom of this for you: www.tablotv.com/ask-tablo

1 Like

I think it may be associated with a recording that was interrupted and split into 2 parts. Viewing the first part of the recording, the play back was dropped aand the reloading message appeared and ran for long time, the first time the light seemed to dim whem accessing the recording but not the second time. My main concern was that the reload kept running until I forced it to cancel. This happened to me again when I reset the DVR wthout thinking while a program was recording, resulting in a split recording. Both times I could not finish watching the split program until I reset my devices. Both times I was able to watch both parts of the programs after resetting the devices with the loss of just a few minutes of the recording. My comments about the power supply were a aknowledgement that I appreciated the response to my question and not a concern about the power supply unless other symptoms occurred. In both cases, once I canceled the reload with the Back Arrow, I could access all the recordings except the problem recording.

Related to this, is the blue light supposed to dim/flicker during certain activities?

The light on my Tablo has always flickered during streaming. I assumed it was indicating activity. It may also flicker during recording (I haven’t actually paid that much attention).

[edit] hmm … according to the support page, it shouldn’t be doing this.

Correct - the light should be solid most of the time.

Maybe you have a bad power supply?