Disk full error while watching live tv

Sporadically, I get a disk full error message when watching live tv via channels on my Apple TV 4K 2nd gen. I have over 2TB of free disk space. Restarting the Channels app will generally fix the issue until it occurs yet again. Everything is up to date. It’s getting frustrating…

I believe that message is about the storage on your Apple TV device, not your server. (The live TV buffer is stored on the client device.)

You may want to remove some unused apps.

You're not the only one this has happened to. I have plenty of storage on my Apple TV and got the same error not long ago.

Is there any work around for this as it has become a real problem for my elderly parents as they don’t know how to fix it when it happens…

Can't you set the buffer at the Server that is what I do with low Storage Fire Devices.

Channels Support - Streaming

Protip: Use Stream while at home to place the buffer on the server if your streaming device’s storage is preventing you from pausing for a long enough time.

Can you submit diagnostics from the device? I can double-check what the actual free disk space is.

Sent diagnostics at 3:52 PM EST.

Thanks :grinning:

Is this issue happening to you more than once? I see that it did happen to you, but I also see that you currently have 4GB free on the device and that we only tried to use 1.8GB of cache, so it's confusing why it ran out of disk space, but it looks like it may have freed up more.

I'm going to look at what we can do to handle this situation better.

Thanks Eric. In regards to your question, it only happened the once on this occasion before I force closed the Channels app and re-tuned the channel. That said, when this does happen, it can occur multiple times within a short window.

In the meantime, would it make sense to apply the suggestion above regarding local streaming?

Easy enough to change the setting in the client and try. You can always change it back.

Did you force quit the app because it quit operating or you just wanted to be safe? That shouldn't be needed and it won't really help anything to do that if the app is still functioning. (depending on when you force quit the app, it could prevent it from doing some of the normal disk cleanup that it would otherwise do)

I have a fix in the works that should prevent the no space left on device error, but I'm still finishing testing it.

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I force quit the app to be safe, it was still responding. That said, thank you for working on a fix as it’s greatly appreciated! :grinning:

The latest Testflight beta will better handle these sorts of situations and should prevent the out of disk space error from happening.

Just for clarification, I’m not using a HDHomeRun for streaming as all of my live content is delivered via TVE. Will this fix still be applicable?

Thanks again for your hard work! :grinning:

Sorry, yes. It’s for all direct streaming at home.

That’s great news Eric. I updated to the new version and we’ll see how it goes. Thanks again :grinning:

Update: This morning I had multiple disk full errors, occurring every few minutes making live tv unwatchable. I submitted multiple log files in order to catch additional errors. The errors start at approximately 7:52 AM EST 2/4.

I had exactly the same issue last night. I finally gave up on Channels and watched live tv using Plex. Which worked perfectly.

Yeah, the only temporary solution for me when this happens is to restart or power cycle my Apple TV, which I assume releases the cache until the issue eventually returns once again…

@_Mike I don't see any diagnostics from you.

@Ahwman Wow this is really crazy. Your Apple TV only had 196MB free out of 29.5GB. Something is definitely odd if the OS is not freeing up disk space. When we've seen issues like this, sometimes it has worked to delete some apps on your system (in System Settings go to General -> Manage Storage). Other times it's required doing a System -> Reset on the device to completely wipe the disk and start over.

I know this is a terrible situation, but so far Apple has not been willing to do anything to fix it.

Outside of the video cache (that is only active during playback), the app only has 7MB of other (image) cached data on the drive, so the issue is coming from another app or the system.

We've done everything we can to fit into this very tiny available disk space, but I really can't think of anything else other than wiping the Apple TV that would fix it if it hasn't resolved itself with a restart.