Stutter watching Live TV on ATV (non-4k)

I seem to have a similar issue with TVE and playback on an Apple TV, but mine is 4K. You said watching the patriots game which I know means it’s on CBS. I also get periodic buffering pauses when trying to watch CBS on the Apple TV that I don’t get on my iPad.

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I mentioned the Pats game, but we're (now) seeing this with everything we watch (live, recorded, etc). I'll have to test with something from PlayOn, otherwise everything we watch originates from TVE.

I took my theorizing here and did some experimenting with changing the Streaming Quality down from "Original" and checked the dropped output frames. 4Mbps is where things are (basically) 0 dropped output frames. 6Mbps has only a few, but still some with regularity (like 1-2 every 10 seconds). Both 4Mbps and 6Mbps result in 720p TV.

So now I'm testing at 4Mbps and at least enjoying watching TV again, which is good. But... obviously it's imperfect and I'd love to find a way to watch with "Original" at 1080p (and not ask my DiskStation to transcode). But I've got a (hopefully temporary) workaround.

I get the same stuttering (at the beginning of the recording and then at the end of com skip) on some, but not all, of my CBS recordings on TVE on my FireStick 4K via ethernet. The shuttering lasts for a few seconds then dissipates and all stuttering stops by mid-program.

Following up here. A day or two after I set my Apple TV app to stream at 4Mbps, I found it streaming at "original" again. I looked and somehow my server had been set to enforce "original" for both Internet and Local streaming. I definitely have no memory of doing this (or a reason why I would have).

I had to go into the DVR and change it to 4Mbps so that it would stop stuttering again.

Is this something new in the app/DVR updates? (of course, I'm hoping this means work is being done on the root cause of the Apple TV stuttering)

Is what new? The ability to set client quality settings from the server has been in place for a while, I believe. I don’t think they would ever set that up automatically, all HE double hockey sticks would break loose if they did. :grin:

The auto-setting of that. I'm nearly certain I didn't make that change and yet, suddenly, there it was.

Not sure how that setting got flipped. I guess the http logs would show exactly when and where from.

I'm interested in more diagnostics from the client app with the latest TestFlight beta. I will be looking into audio and video issues this week.

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I'm wondering if you just have a bad cable?

I just sent another round in playing at "Original". For the first 20-30 seconds I didn't notice any stuttering and only saw it dropping 1-5 output frames every 10 seconds or so. Then the rate continued increasing until it was just stuttering all over the place, dropping 50-60 frames every few seconds unabated.

I sent in my diagnostics at this point.

Then I continued testing to see what the highest working bitrate was. 8Mbps still had lots of dropped output frames, unfortunately, but 6Mbps was almost zero (maybe 50 frames per minute, or even less). That's better than before (I think).

One thing I noticed: with the current latest betas on my DS1520+ and my Apple TV, I see the stats reporting ~93seconds of buffer at "Original" but it seems to max out at 5seconds with any of the transcoded versions. I think this is new, but I could very much be misremembering. Anyway, it didn't seem to negatively affect my ability to jump forward/back with any of it.

I hope this all helps, but please just let me know if you need any more data or diags. Thanks so much for digging in for all of us!

You may also want to swap out that ATV.. I have 3 ATV's all hard wired to the same switch and have zero issues. Those speedtest numbers were really bad over your LAN. You also said you have no issues with other clients. The common point seems to be your ATV. Grab one from Walmart or bestbuy, try it and if it doesn't fix it then return it :wink:

We've noticed an issue where bringing up the stats for nerds causes frame dropping. Without the stats enabled do you still see the stutter?

You're right that there's an Ethernet anomaly, but over Wi-Fi I'm getting ~200Mbps, so I don't think that's the issue.

With "Original" I was seeing the stutter consistently, yeah.

200 is still slow. I am getting nearly 500 with a $20 device.

Wi-Fi introduces a lot of variables. In my environment, 200 is consistent with other Wi-Fi devices, for sure.

And that $20 device is likely using a more modern chipset for wifi, whereas the Apple TV HD (non-4K) is 6 years old, which in streaming devices is positively ancient. That's not a proper comparison.

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Yeah but if ethernet is a problem on that ATV then what else is having an issue. Plug a laptop into that cable and run some tests. If everything is fine then it's your ATV.

this could be unrelated to OP’s issue but here’s another data point: I was experiencing pretty bad stuttering with the experimental video driver only. Default was fine. After a reinstall the experimental is back to being buttery smooth.

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A 4k stream only needs 20Mbps.

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