It appears that Apple has released a new feature in TVOS15 called “spatial stereo”. This is different than spatial audio. With the experimental audio driver, this feature can get enabled when using AirPods Pro and this can cause video hangs.
FYI.
This morning I was playing around with TvOS15 and channels for the first time, and observed some flaky behavior in the beta TestFlight release, detailed
Here:
And Here:
At first I thought the video issue hanging with the experimental drivers was just on the beta release.
However @tmm1 and @maddox I have noticed that this occurs on the release version of channels on Apple TVOs15 as well. So if anyone happens to be using AirPods Pros with channels, and the experimental audio driver, then the video can hang when changing channels. Sometimes it is in super slow motion.
Edit:
No dropped frames, according to the (info) show stats tab on the drop down menu. End edit
Now as an aside, it appears that only two channels of a multichannel program are being recognized, so the OS is seeing that an AirPod pro is connected, and that stereo material is available (even if multichannel) and offering the user to use “spatial stereo”
For now , to avoid video hangs when using AirPods Pro’s perhaps just use the default audio driver.
Hope this helps