Apple TVOS 14.5 studdering on live tv channels

Anyone notice an issue with studdering on Apple TV on HDHOMERUN live channels after the latest tvOS update?

Network bandwidth is fine. Same live channels work on the hdHOMERUN Apple TV app with perfect picture quality and no studdering. Channels on other iOS devices works perfectly, just on the Apple TV all the sudden.

Rebooting router and hdHOMERUN box seems to fix the issue temporarily, but after a random period of time all the live channels seem to be exhibiting buffering issues or studdering.

100mb download speed on Apple TV. Iā€™m running an always on Mac mini as the channels server. It had been practically bulletproof until either the latest channels DVR update or the latest tvOS update.

Anyone else seeing this weirdness. ?

HD or 4K model?

You can try changing the settings under Settings > Playback > Advanced to Experimental for Video/Audio Driver and Deinterlacing

This is the Apple TV 4K - not the one that was just released , but the original 4K.

Iā€™ve tried all the experimental drivers. Iā€™m still getting random pauses in live tv as well as pixelation at times.

All the antenna signal qualities look great.

I also tried the experimental server as well and that didnā€™t help, so I went back to the ā€œstable releaseā€ Out of desperation I even deleted the app on my Apple TV and reinstalled. Same issue going on now.

Is there any way to roll back the server version to the one that is pre custom collections to see if the server update has created this issue?

UPDATE:

Pulling the power cable on the Apple TV 4K and power cycling seems to have fixed this for now. A soft reset on the Apple TV had no effect, but a power cycle did.

This is weird....but at least I can go to sleep now and revisit this in the morning....

UPDATE:

problem was solved when moved Apple TV over to hardwired Ethernet. The wireless connection was measured at 270mbit/sec using iperf3, so Iā€™m not sure why all the sudden using wireless connection became unstable when it was extremely stable for months. Iā€™m suspecting a new neighbors WiFi radio clobbering my intermittently getting the communication between Apple TV and server/HDHomeRun out of sync somehow.

So lesson learned, to really maximize performance use hardwired Ethernet connections for your server, your Apple TV (or other streaming device if it has an Ethernet port) and your HDHomeRun.

Hope this helps someone

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