I tried recording a movie over the weekend, I’m sure there was no conflict, when I go to the Recordings screen and click on the movie, instead of the play icon, I see a red exclamation mark.
Weak signal?
I’m close to the TV towers, and the Tablo is showing 5 green bars on most of my channels (including the one the recording was supposed to be on).
@max - Was it just that recording or is it all recordings? If it was just this recording, it usually is due to a signal issue. Signals can be affected by poor weather - did you have a storm this weekend?
Just this one recording completely failed (I couldn’t press the play button, there was an exclamation mark instead of the play button). All the other recordings (so far) have been successful in terms of me being able to play them.
And the weather was fine on Sunday. There’s a storm coming through yesterday/today, but my recordings from last night are successful.
I’d need to check, I’m not sure. It’s CW… I’ve been able to watch it in terms of live TV, but I’m not sure I’ve ever recorded it.
OK - try a few other test recordings and let us know how it goes.
Recording #2 has failed. Different channel than before, I’m starting to be concerned.
I have an active splitter and the Tablo is one side and my TV is on the other side. TV has no problem getting the channel, decent signal strength. Tablo shows an exclamation mark next to the recording, and when I tune to that channel it plays for a few seconds and then it’s as if the reception goes bad and the circle in the middle just scrolls. Check back in 5 minutes, and it streams fine on the Tablo and my TV, but my recording already failed. All the other channels stream fine.
It seems that the Tablo is misbehaving due to what it perceives is poor signal strength. I don’t think the Tablo should stop recording due to poor signal strength. If the show has poor reception for 5 minutes, and works for 55 minutes, that’s not a reason to avoid recording.
Tech support confirmed it’s due to poor reception.
@max - Tablo will keep trying through bad reception but only for a designated time before giving up. The logic of this is that if a recording will be unwatchable for more than a minute or so at a time, the average person wouldn’t want to sit through it anyways.
Have you tried tweaking your antenna direction?
The antenna is pointed towards the TV towers, and I’m pretty close by (<10miles), most of the time the reception is fine, but not always. This is one of my weaker channels, so I knew I was going to have problems with it occasionally with OTA.
I understand why Tablo did what it did, but nonetheless I’ll add it to my wishlist for an option to record even during bad reception (to let the user decide to watch or delete, instead of the Tablo giving up), but I know it’s not going to be a high priority item for you guys.
Good feedback Max. As you probably know, we’re gathering feedback from everyone to create a master feature wishlist. I’ll make sure this is on it.