Yes, if you have enabled Adaptive Streaming for Live TV you should be running the latest beta version of the app.
If you don't, you may experience strange behaviors including the video stopping playing after a while, quality dropping to lower bitrates when it shouldn't, and other sorts of bad experiences.
OK thanks Eric. I’ll try to make sure I have the latest.
Important Update: I have just released v2020.01.04.0209 that contains a change to remove any negative side-effects of having Live TV ABR enabled regardless of what devices are connected.
Once you upgrade to this latest DVR beta, the DVR will validate if the client is able to handle Live TV ABR without issue and if it cannot confirm it, it will serve it a fixed bitrate stream (the way it has worked before ABR). Only the latest clients have the code required to indicate to the DVR that they support Live TV ABR, so please update your clients if you would like to continue testing.
The good news is you can now have Live TV ABR enabled and clients that are still using the released builds (including Fire TV) will still work the way it used to (with non-adaptive streams).
Great stuff, thanks!
Reading through this forum post:
Regarding the newer ABR feature, are there [or could there be] options on remote client devices that would allow for separate control of how the audio vs. video is handled? For watching OTA remotely at a vacation home or cabin with a full 5.1 [or greater] channel surround system, it would be nice to get the Dolby audio passed uncompressed if possible.
For ABR to work, all bitrates must be sending H.264 video and AAC audio. We send 5.1 channel AAC for the 8mbps bitrate, and 2 channel below that.
The only way to get the uncompressed audio is to pick the Original setting (which will not use ABR in the cases that the audio is not already in AAC).
I just grabbed the Fire TV 4k device for the half off sale (only $25) and it's perfect. Had it running Channels DVR beta in minutes. Absolutely fantastic.
Thank you all for your help in testing this.
I've shipped a new DVR beta v2020.01.15.2157 that turns on Adaptive Bitrate for Live TV for everyone who has Adaptive Streaming enabled (the default).
Note: The server checks if the client is new enough to handle Adaptive Streaming for Live TV and if it isn't, will fall back to a single bitrate.
The App Store versions of all apps are now capable of handling Adaptive Streaming for Live TV, so if you update to that (and the latest DVR beta), you will be using it.