Recent Reduced Performance in Skip or Fast Forward

Over the last mont or two, I’ve noticed that higher quality, higher bandwidth streams are having more trouble keeping up when trying to fast forward, seek, or skip.

While I recognize the uncompressed files are heavy lifting for the wi-fi networks, I have noticed that if I pause and give the app a moment to refresh the buffer, it is a significantly better user experience and my audio/video isn’t choppy.

Is the buffer something we can set in the client app?

If we could, it might also be nice to configure how long we keep live tv. Sometimes, when I leave for work, my Shih Tzu needs to watch her stories. I can watch an entire day of TV when I get home if I want to so long as there were not network interruptions to the HDHR.

Sooooo, if you happen to give us the option to set buffer time on recordings, it may also be nice to allow user configurability on the live tv buffer.

Sorry for the issue and feature request all in one :confused:

9 times out of 10, your issues with seeking and fast forward are network related. If at all possible, you should be on a wired network using ethernet or Moca 2.0 for best performance. When I first began using Channels on my ATV, I was using powerline adapters for my wired network. Fast forward/Rewind and commercial skipping was painfully slow and would also cause freezing for several seconds. I upgraded to Moca 2.0 throughout my house and now everything is buttery smooth and channel skipping is instantaneous.

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On an Apple TV 4th gen, the Ethernet is slower than Wi-Fi. When connected via Ethernet, seek performance is terrible. While I know it’s a lot of uncompressed data beaming through the air, but the fact that it seems to get worse or better around app updates leads me to management of the stream on the server outbound or the client inbound side. Also, if I start a high definition network stream from NBC for example, and immediately pause it, there is no stuttering or buffering issue if I let it sit paused for a few moments. The network, disks, and server have all been replaced yet it still happens. I’ve ruled out gremlins and bad mojo. I’m hoping we can get something sorted from the application side.

I had a similar problem with seeking skipping on Apple tv4 and wired. I made this fix on the windows DVR, and all has been perfect since:

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I’m assuming this addresses Ethernet connectivity on the client side but doesn’t impact packets interpreted by the switch or the access point for Wi-Fi connections?

Auto-tune in Windows tries to predict how much data the other side can receive and only send that much. For some reason this means it sends very little of the recording over right away, so seeks are slow. With autotuning off, the file is transferred over the network much more quickly.

It's unclear why this started becoming a problem, but it likely had to do with a tvOS upgrade or something else that changed in the past year.

I did apply the changes to tcp on the Windows server, rebooted, and that seems to have addressed the slowness in seeking and commercial skipping. Because this is a dedicated media server, I’m not too concerned about potential impact on other network services. I will watch Plex to see if it functions in an unexpected fashion after this change.

Thanks for the direction, as always!

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I’ve been running this pc this way since Apr, and have seen nothing impacted. All web and file transfers and everything are great.

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Have to say, running Windows10 and AppleTV I had this problem of skip forward sometimes stalling for say 10 seconds at a time. Turning autotune off has solved the issue.

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