# Roamio plus OOH download issues



## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

Trying to download a program stored on my TiVO to my iPad mini (running ios 6) with the TiVO app that was just updated yesterday (Nov 6).

I can start the download but after about 5 minutes or so the download simply pauses, I have to then restart the download and it again will work for about 5 minutes and pause again.

Anybody else seeing this behavior?

-TL


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

Question - who is your internet/cable provider?

How is streaming playback? Does your video stream regularly freeze streaming locally?


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

works fine at home, no issues at all although transfers could be faster but that's another issue, ISP is Verizon FiOS,speed is 50/25.

Streaming OOH works, the quality is about 1/3 to 1/2 scale but seems to work without any issues. (no freezes or pausing)

-TL


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

I am just stitching together very flimsily threads...

I am experiencing what I can only diagnose as the IOS app temporarily disconnecting from the Stream. It happens during both internal and external viewing and I have had downloads fail as well. Not 100% of the time, but often enough.

I am not sure if any of this is connected - I am also on FIOS, but I am not sure that makes any difference either.


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

bradleys said:


> I am just stitching together very flimsily threads...
> 
> I am experiencing what I can only diagnose as the IOS app temporarily disconnecting from the Stream. It happens during both internal and external viewing and I have had downloads fail as well. Not 100% of the time, but often enough.
> 
> I am not sure if any of this is connected - I am also on FIOS, but I am not sure that makes any difference either.


As I said in my house it works fine, I did initially have problems with disconnections in my house but that was due to the Roamio attempting to use both WiFi and Ethernet at the same time. There are some threads regarding this on the Roamio board along with what appears to be a valid work around.

-TL


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## tedmundson (Nov 28, 2003)

I have a standalone Stream and I am seeing this issue also I am on FIOS with a 75/35 circuit


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Time_Lord said:


> Trying to download a program stored on my TiVO to my iPad mini (running ios 6) with the TiVO app that was just updated yesterday (Nov 6).
> 
> I can start the download but after about 5 minutes or so the download simply pauses, I have to then restart the download and it again will work for about 5 minutes and pause again.
> 
> ...


 Just trying OOH downloads today and seeing the same thing. Every few minutes the download just stops and I have to resume it.
I tried streaming and the quality was pretty awful. The WiFi connection I'm using is not great but better than you find in most hotels, so looks like streaming is out of the question. On same WiFi connection, using Slingbox yields a MUCH better video quality, but the control lags for Slingbox is annoying.

The Stream download quality is much, much better and you can let it download for a while before you start watching for uninterrupted better quality watching. However this download pausing issue looks to be a PITA meaning you have to keep babysitting the downloads. So far for a 1 hour download I've already had to resume download 4 times for 1/3 of the show (which works out to about a pause every 5 mins).


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Watching the downloads I see that every 5 mins or so I get a "Reconnecting" message in the iOS App which then switches the App over to My Shows page on the DVR instead of on the App. At that point the download then pauses. So it looks to me like perhaps there's an inactivity timer set to 5 minutes that is being used when in OOH mode.


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## Devx (Jun 1, 2006)

moyekj said:


> Watching the downloads I see that every 5 mins or so I get a "Reconnecting" message in the iOS App which then switches the App over to My Shows page on the DVR instead of on the App. At that point the download then pauses. So it looks to me like perhaps there's an inactivity timer set to 5 minutes that is being used when in OOH mode.


That may be true on the inactivity timer but its inconsistent then. I checked one of my previous results on OOH downloading (via LTE) and I also received disconnects roughly every 5 minutes or so but it wasn't consistently every 5 minutes. Sometimes there was a longer time span between the disconnect.

I'll add that streaming from my home internet via LTE using another app, such as AirVideo, doesn't exhibit any such problems or frequent disconnects. I can often watch for an hour with only one pause and the app can usually resume on its own after ~2-3 secs.

It's very interesting that over the same connection the Sling was able to deliver a better experience.

We need the update from Tivo to remove their proxy server as a variable. Based on my own experiences and reading posts from others, I believe the Tivo proxy is causing issues, for some more than others.


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## JonHB (Aug 28, 2007)

moyekj said:


> Watching the downloads I see that every 5 mins or so I get a "Reconnecting" message in the iOS App which then switches the App over to My Shows page on the DVR instead of on the App. At that point the download then pauses. So it looks to me like perhaps there's an inactivity timer set to 5 minutes that is being used when in OOH mode.


I'm having the exact same issue. I just used a timer on it and for the couple of disconnects that I timed, they were within 2-3 seconds of the 5 minute mark. There's definitely some timer controlling this.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

JonHB said:


> I'm having the exact same issue. I just used a timer on it and for the couple of disconnects that I timed, they were within 2-3 seconds of the 5 minute mark. There's definitely some timer controlling this.


 Yes it looks to be intentional to me. Note that I didn't try interacting with the App while it was downloading, other than of course re-starting the download every time it stopped. If it is an inactivity timer then presumably interacting with the App while it's downloading should prevent timeouts from happening. Perhaps watching the program while it downloads is enough to prevent these timeouts from happening?

If it is indeed a timeout then there should be an option to change it or disable it...


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## JonHB (Aug 28, 2007)

I'm watching a show at work right now on my iPad while it is downloading and it is still stopping every 5 minutes. I've even tapped the "Done" option while watching, then restarted viewing and the download portion will still stop in 5 minutes. Pretty annoying.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

JonHB said:


> I'm watching a show at work right now on my iPad while it is downloading and it is still stopping every 5 minutes. I've even tapped the "Done" option while watching, then restarted viewing and the download portion will still stop in 5 minutes. Pretty annoying.


 That's just ridiculous then. Surely can't have been intentionally designed to do that? Streaming quality was so terrible I didn't try it much, but I presume streaming is not doing this timeout thing too is it?

P.S. I want your job!


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Maybe instead of inactivity timer there's some code that automatically refreshes the My Shows list every 5 minutes and that is not being turned off when an OOH download is happening. I don't have the problem for in home downloads, so there is something different about OOH downloads triggering this problem.


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## JonHB (Aug 28, 2007)

Been watching a streaming episode of Leno for about 10 mins and no issues with stopping. The other ones that were pausing were each about 800 MB downloads that I had started at home, then let finish at work. I was downloading this way because it is much better quality than streaming.

Honestly, I'd prefer work was much busier so I couldn't watch shows!


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

JonHB said:


> Been watching a streaming episode of Leno for about 10 mins and no issues with stopping. The other ones that were pausing were each about 800 MB downloads that I had started at home, then let finish at work. I was downloading this way because it is much better quality than streaming.


 OK, so OOH streaming doesn't suffer from the pausing issue, but OOH downloads do. That's too bad as streaming quality is not good enough for me. I just again compared OOH streaming to my iPad Air vs Slingbox client on my iPad Air and the Sling quality was vastly superior, so OOH streaming is useless as far as I'm concerned.


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## JonHB (Aug 28, 2007)

Another interersting issue while I'm thinking about it... There were several slight pauses and jumps during playback of the downloaded shows. I wonder if these were artifacts stored in the download file from the frequent pausing. I do not recall having that issue on any of the downloads I did while I was at home.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

JonHB said:


> Another interersting issue while I'm thinking about it... There were several slight pauses and jumps during playback of the downloaded shows. I wonder if these were artifacts stored in the download file from the frequent pausing. I do not recall having that issue on any of the downloads I did while I was at home.


 Yes I noticed that as well, and I suspect it is related to resuming downloads at slightly incorrect time points.


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## southerndoc (Apr 5, 2003)

The OOH download feature has major bugs. Pauses every few minutes, unable to complete a download while running in the background, etc. Basically it hijacks your ipad and requires you to be present to resume the download every few minutes. Might as well stream it live since you have to attend to it anyway.


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## JonHB (Aug 28, 2007)

geekmedic said:


> The OOH download feature has major bugs. Pauses every few minutes, unable to complete a download while running in the background, etc. Basically it hijacks your ipad and requires you to be present to resume the download every few minutes. Might as well stream it live since you have to attend to it anyway.


I didn't take my ipad home last night, so I couldn't download shows on the local LAN. I'm now trying to do them from work, but getting the damned timeout every 5 minutes!!  How did this bug get by QA?

Yeah, I really don't get why it can't download in the background. That is a major shortcoming also.


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## MacBrian (Feb 24, 2002)

bradleys said:


> I am not sure if any of this is connected - I am also on FIOS, but I am not sure that makes any difference either.


I'm having the same issue on AT&T's Uverse internet.


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## dbattaglia001 (Feb 9, 2003)

Has TiVo acknowledged this issue? The OOH streaming seems to be frankly unusable. Has anyone actually had a good experience with this feature?


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

dbattaglia001 said:


> Has TiVo acknowledged this issue? The OOH streaming seems to be frankly unusable. Has anyone actually had a good experience with this feature?


 For OOH real time streaming the video quality was pitiful when I tried it, and because of the OOH download timeout issues that is not a useable solution either. So right now I still use Sling for OOH streaming. If TiVo at least fixed the OOH download timeout issue then I would use it since I like immediate trick play response you get vs the Sling solution.

For those that have Twitter accounts (which is not me) it may be useful to Tweet Margret about the OOH download issue at the very least as that looks to be something that could be easily fixed. Don't know how effective it is to give negative reviews to the App via iTunes.


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## cranrob (Nov 7, 2013)

I contacted Tivo support about this (I have a Premier + Stream, not a Roamio). I am seeing the "pausing" problem when attempting out-of-home downloading.

After a bit of back-and-forth, here was the response:

_I do apologize but using switches or hubs are not supported, and is most likely the cause of this issue. To get the out of home streaming to work I suggest that you hardwire the TiVo box and the TiVo Stream directly to the main router. I do apologize or any inconvenience that this may cause. _

I find this laughable. I have a Gigabit Ethernet Switch connected to my router, and both my Premier and Stream are also connected to this switch. Any router that has multiple ethernet ports also contains an ethernet switch.

I really don't know how to respond to this - they are basically saying that Tivo does not support common Ethernet networking.


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

cranrob said:


> I
> 
> _I do apologize but using switches or hubs are not supported, and is most likely the cause of this issue. To get the out of home streaming to work I suggest that you hardwire the TiVo box and the TiVo Stream directly to the main router. I do apologize or any inconvenience that this may cause. _
> support common Ethernet networking.


I got the same response when I have having problems with connectivity on my Roamio, the problem (that I ended up diagnosing on my own thanks to the fact I had a manageable switch) turned out to be TiVO's problem in the form of a bug where the wireless which I had enabled to initially configure the unit never turned off even though it was off in the TiVO menus causing the TiVO to bounce back and forth between WiFi and ethernet.

-TL


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## cranrob (Nov 7, 2013)

Time_Lord said:


> the problem (that I ended up diagnosing on my own thanks to the fact I had a manageable switch) turned out to be TiVO's problem in the form of a bug where the wireless which I had enabled to initially configure the unit never turned off even though it was off in the TiVO menus causing the TiVO to bounce back and forth between WiFi and ethernet.


My Tivo Box (Premier XL4) doesn't have wireless capability.

However, Tivo pushed out a new IOS app this morning, which seems to have fixed this bug.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

cranrob said:


> However, Tivo pushed out a new IOS app this morning, which seems to have fixed this bug.


 I'm downloading a show in medium quality right now via OOH WiFi. I still have the "Reconnecting" issue every 5 minutes or so, however now it looks like ongoing download either continues or resumes automatically, so certainly an improvement!


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