Poor Quality with ATV 4K

[bowens]

I've noticed lately, more with some apps than others, that the video quality on the ATV 4K has been pretty bad. I don't have the best internet, but apps like Discovery+ are almost unwatchable. If I use the app on my Sony OLED which runs Android TV, the picture looks great. Last night Hulu wouldn't even load video on the ATV. They played fine on the Android app. Any ideas what could be causing this?

Edit: I've also had an issue with ATV+ not playing videos at all.

 

[Audit13]

I have not had any issues with Hulu, HBOMax, Netflix, or Prime on my ATV 4k 1st Gen.

I run all of my apps over WiFi.

 

[bowens]

My ATV 4K 2nd gen and my TV are both on wifi and obviously right next to each other. It's weird. I've noticed it mostly with Discovery+ because my wife watches cooking shows on there. It's terrible. But plays fine on the TV app or on a fire tv.

 

[Audit13]

Could be an app issue? I'm running the latest tvOS and all of my apps are up-to-date.

 

[w5jck]

I too have the ATV 4K 2017 (1st gen) and resolution and quality is good. Hulu Live TV acts up on some channels, but that is a Hulu issue. Philo use to act up a lot, but that was a Philo issue as well. I got rid of Philo. But both of those apps acted up on my Sony Bravia Android TV and my Fire TV Cube as well. Netflix, Disney+, Britbox, Hulu on-demand, and Youtube are all good. CuriousityStream typically starts a stream in low resolution then a few seconds later gets enough buffered to stream it in high resolution, but that is a CuriousityStream issue/quirk. I have 200 Mbits internet service and everything is wired via ethernet.

Wi-Fi, even fast Wi-Fi, has to share its bandwidth with all the other devices connected via Wi-Fi, so it can and will slow down on occasion. If you have 20 or 30 Wi-Fi devices, and you probably do since a lot of devices have internet connections these days, then expect some major traffic jams!

 

[bowens]

Yeah, it's just weird that the ATV has problems but these other streaming devices don't.

 

[satcomer]

Yeah, it's just weird that the ATV has problems but these other streaming devices don't.

It has to do with certain encoding streams are Windows only streams and they hate Apple!