I apologize if that has been asked elsewhere but I can’t seem to figure out why. For whatever reason only some of my recordings show a fast forward preview but not all. For example when I record NBC nightly news there is a preview but when I record an NFL game there isn’t. I read the blog that Tablo wrote early last year that stated it should work with all recording. Anyone know why this isn’t working for all recordings? Is this just my issue or others having it?
I was actually wondering the same thing last night. The truly odd thing is I have had a couple of recordings that the preview worked in sometimes, but not others during the same viewing.
Mine seems to be consistent on which recording have it or not.
Are you folks aware that you won’t get previews till recording is completed?
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No I was not aware of that but that does explain my issue. Thanks for the clarity!
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I wonder if there is a way they could program it to capture that information as it is being recorded. Like take a snapshot every 30 seconds or something.
That’s a good question for Tablo. Don’t know the answer.
Yes. The recordings I have seen preview “oddities” on have all been completed. For example the wife and I were watching last week’s Hawaii Five-O on Sunday morning and it exhibited this behavior.
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Recordings must be completed and have a free tuner to run the recording through to generate the preview thumbnails. So if you’re still recording other material you may not get the preview thumbnails right away.
If you have completed recordings that have had a free tuner for a few hours to run the recording through to generate the preview thumbnails, and the preview thumbnails are not there, please open a Support Ticket directly with Tablo Support.
They can remote in to your Tablo to see why the thumbnails were not generated for a specific recording and likely provide a fix in the future for such a bug.
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As I understand it, the Tablo uses a tuner to create the preview. It is sort of like a separate mini-recording of the same show. Since it needs a tuner, the Tablo waits until there is time available (no other shows watched or recorded) on the tuner. It may simply be that you don’t have a free tuner available.
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Seconds. You beat me to this by seconds.
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One more note to keep in mind… If there’s an error in the recording at some point the generation of the FFW preview might fail. So if the recording is complete and there’s an available tuner to process the preview and you’ve waited for it to to complete and there’s still no previews, this is the likely culprit.
What defines an error in the recording?
I would say I tend to get these types of errors less than 2% of the time since the last update.
When that happens, it’s back to estimating the 4 minute average commercial, with usually 1 shorter 2 to 3 minute near then end (although I have noticed the stations are mixing that up a bit now). 24 clicks and I am generally there.
So, for those few shows that the thumbnails don’t get generated, it is not too bad.
If there’s an error in the recording at some point the generation of the FFW preview might fail.
Is there a way to restart that job? Or make it redo? WAF decreases significantly when this happens.
I still have rare times (~10-20%) when there are no previews and I know one or more tuners are free. And I know it is not signal dropouts because I have a very strong and stable signal. No dropouts in over two years. The thing that I would like to see fixed is the number of empty preview windows. I get them way to often and two many per hour. Its almost worse that not getting any previews.