Live TV Playing In Slow Motion on Apple TV 4k

Same for me. The Testflight Beta works great (other than an occasional glitch with scrolling the guide), the public release, not so much.

I’m going to repeat myself here

1. Submitting diagnostics from the App Store build (7.0.2) is not going to help us on this issue — it doesn’t have the info we need

2. Saying it’s still happening on the latest TestFlight without submitting diagnostics is not going to help us figure out this issue — we can’t see what’s going on without the diagnostics

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Let me reiterate Ivan's post and also say: Since one of the Testflight updates a few weeks back, I stopped having the issue with hardware deinterlacing as well. You can scroll up to see my post on it from 4/21.

Looking in testflight I can see that the 4.15.250 build has "First build with iOS/tvOS 26 SDK" in it's release notes. 4.21.522 has "Match Context and Frame Rate was not being kicked off when starting playback"

Maybe one of those fixed it?

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You really need to chill out. As a software developer myself I will say that there are clearly a lot of moving parts to this problem and various people in this thread appear to be experiencing a varying level of success with the current builds over the last few weeks.

The situation is hardly as dire as you are painting it to be:

  1. There is a workaround available (disable hardware deinterlacing)
  2. There are beta builds available which seem to resolve the issue for some or most of us?

On top of which it appears to be an issue introduced by changes Apple made, not Channels themselves. There is no open record of what Apple is changing and there is no commit history to spelunk through that might offer some insight into what happened on their end like you would have with FOSS software.

So give it a rest and let the developers do their work. We are on the path to a resolution and we'll get there.

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If the beta has the solution then there is a know resolution. HDHomeRun on the same Apple devices have no issues with this.

Not all users are as technical and comfortable with what is entailed in loading the beta or the other steps required. I am simply saying that 6 weeks later something is not right and someone should call it out.

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Please update to the latest Testflight beta, reproduce the issue with the Hardware Deinterlacer, submit diagnostics again, and let us know:

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Any reports of it occurring on an iOS device, besides maybe this one with iPad app on mac mini?

Additionally:

you need to TELL us that you experienced the problem and sent diagnostics.

We get hundreds of submissions a day of people just SENDING diagnostics thinking that's going to result in something. It will not. You need to contact us, either in this thread, or at [email protected], so we know you had the issue and submitted diagnostics, so we can go find them and inspect them.

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Could channels thinking that an atsc 1.0 hdhr feed is progressive when it is actually an interlaced broadcast feed cause these kind of slow mo issues?

I made an observation the past couple of mornings that may or may be of some help. I live in an area between two markets and I am 50 miles from one and 65 miles from the other. Obviously due to this I have occasional signal issues. The exception to this is early in the morning. The tv market that is 65 miles away from me carries the news I like to watch. The past two days the signal on this channel is dead perfect from about 5:00 am to 9:00 am (pegged out at 100% across the board according to the HDHomerun tuner). I was able to watch the news and leave it on that channel for two hours with absolutely zero issues. This was a 1080i channel that runs at a constant 13.5 mbps. I have noticed that sometimes when it goes into this half frame rate slow motion routine that it occurs when I have a significant signal issue. I am not running the test flight beta either. I do think this is something that Apple has created though as it started (or I noticed it) after the 26.4 update. It does seem that signal dropouts make this issue worse or speeds up the timeframe on which it starts. Again, don't know if this helps any or not, but it is something I have noticed.

I agree that the problem seems to have coincided with the drop of TVOS 26.4 (or maybe even 26.3). My question for the developers is this, if the beta seems to have remedied the issue for most of us, why is it not considered a "fix"? If I were to guess, I would think that maybe all the beta does is force hardware interlacing off, irrespective of what the setting actually says, as a workaround?

Response?

Thank you for continuing to work this issue for us, as speaking for myself, I do appreciate it!

David

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Because we have gotten conflicting reports. Because we didn't have any code changes that we can attribute a fix to. We don't like to cross our fingers and release something that we hope magically fixes something if we can't understand why it could have been fixed.

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That makes sense, thank you for the response.

David

I can confirm that tvOS 26.5 does not fix the de-interlacing/frame drop issue.

@anderdg did you submit diagnostics after it happened on the latest TestFlight beta?

I should have qualified that was using the “production” tvOS client, not the beta client. There’s still a slight video lag with the beta client, but I haven’t experienced the severe lag and frame drops since switching to the beta.

For what it's worth, I have not had this issue since using the TestFlight betas after multiple hours of use. Just updated ATV to 26.5 and all is working.

Agree, i'm a HDHR standalone app user and i can't use a beta version even if i wanted to.
I have to wait for an official release to see the bugs fixed and it's been months since the last one.

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Still no resolution.

I will also add that this is less likely an Apple OS issue and more of a Channels development one. I say this because using the HDHomeRun app I have zero issues. I don’t like the user interface of HDHomeRun, but it works so that is what I am now using. At this point I may not return to Channels.

If there is a solution in Beta, then there is a known solution. It is disrespectful to continue with this issue when they obviously have a resolution.

Go ahead and use HDHomeRun's colecovision-style GUI with no features, in that case.

If you're searching for causes, you can probably peg either Apple's SDK (which lord knows the last time Silicondust synced to it) or ATSC3, which is the biggest WIP/beta test of all.

Complaining about the beta process and then citing a beta build that got helped from diagnostics as 100% prod ready is an interesting tactic.