tvOS 15/Apple TV 4K (2021) buffering

[J@ffa]

I'm having issues using Home Sharing to stream content to my Apple TV 4K (2nd Gen) and I was wondering if anyone could help. Although all my streaming apps work fine, watching anything via Home Sharing through the Computers app doesn't seem to be buffering at all. What happens is although the film starts playing promptly, as soon as there's a busy scene or picture (say, transitioning from a dark scene to a busy bright one), the Apple TV pauses playback repeatedly. It's not stuttering on the file itself, but it looks to me like it's not caching/buffering at all — the playback indicator shows the spinning wheel for however long it pauses for, which can be anywhere from a split second to a few seconds. Once it settles down, if the picture is consistent it plays fine.

First of all, does anyone know if in tvOS 15 the timeline at the bottom should be showing me if the file is buffering? I remember it used to fill up with a solid colour bar as it progressively cached the movie, but they've tweaked the interface enough times that I can't be sure if it's meant to do that now or not. It's not filling on mine for sure at all.

The 4K files themselves I'm pretty sure are fine as they play back on my Mac fine, and they're not absurdly high bitrate files or anything. I'm on 802.11ac Wi-Fi on both devices, in the same room with no obstructions or etc. I've tried a different HDMI cable as well as switched out my router temporarily just in case it's a network glitch but the behaviour is the same. Any tips appreciated!

 

[niteflyr]

When I play movies via Home Sharing on the Computers app, it clearly shows that it is buffering on the timeline. Are you out of memory on your ATV4K? Have you tried a reset? (unplug wait 30 sec's, power up again)

 

[J@ffa]

Thanks for replying. I did turn it off for a while, and no joy (I powered off everything including my TV, soundbar, etc).

However, I just found a solution! I was fully up to date on tvOS 15.1.1, so as a hail mary I installed the current developer beta of tvOS 15.2 and tested again, and it's all back to working normally! Very happy. So either an bug of some kind in the update or just a bad luck glitch for me (as I couldn't see anyone reporting the same problem). tvOS updates are usually pretty minimal so unlike running an iOS/macOS beta I don't see any knock-on effects from running a beta.

 

[J@ffa]

Quick update for anyone who stumbles across this thread… this problem came back with a vengeance within weeks of my previous post and nothing I tried fixed it. I gave in yesterday and did a factory reset of the Apple TV, and it immediately started working perfectly. Fingers crossed it lasts, but for now, all seems well.

 

[89aw11s/c]

Edit: factory reset appears to have worked for me as well (with any luck)
……
Ok thanks for the update, I’m going to try that next as I’m having the same problem on both of my ATV4k’s; prior to this issue, both would max out their gigE network connection when buffering from the home share host. The problem appears to occur with tvOS 15.1, 15.2, and 15.3.

Here’s my experience with this bug: Upon starting playback of a file, network upload rates from the home share machine initially hit about 44MB/s, and then seconds later drop off to 17MB/s…then nothing, followed by bursts of 9MB/s (playback of high-bitrate video on the Apple TV stalls-out at this point, as it can’t buffer quickly enough).

This is repeatable on both Apple TV’s with every file, using iTunes 12.8.3.1. Curiously airplay-iNG the file from iTunes to the Apple TV works successfully, and will max out the Ethernet connection and buffer space. Also curious is that the ATV’s buffer successfully when connected to an ancient version of iTunes (11.4) running on snow leopard.

 

[sebalvarez]

I would like to add my frustration with this issue as well. I'm having a lot of buffering problems, but not on every app in the Apple TV 2021, just the Computers app when playing home videos. Right now, I have been looking at my puppy for about two minutes frozen only 32 seconds into the start of the 6 minute video, because it's just a test.

And this has nothing to do with my Mac or the Apple TV. Both are connected to the router using almost brand new high quality cables. The computer is a brand new Mac Studio Ultra with a 4 TB internal drive that has a speed of 6 GBps. The router is a Motorola MG7550 with Gigabit Ethernet.

I tried resetting both the router and the Apple TV with no change. The videos I find freezing all the time are rather low bitrate, one is a long video in 1080p HEVC 8 bit at like 10 Mbps, the others are tests out of Final Cut Pro, encoding with either FCP or Compressor, but nothing like even 50 Mbps, which this setup should still handle without any problems.

And like I said before, everything else, that comes from the internet, like Netflix, HBOMax, Prime Video, etc, work flawlessly. I have a Spectrum connection that is 300 Mbps down, not that it should matter for this anyway.

If this was a setup where both computer and Apple TV were connected via Wi-Fi, to the 2 Ghz band, and the router was far away, maybe it would make sense. But no, while they're both connected to the Wi-Fi, their primary connection is ethernet, and both are within a few feet of the router.

Any ideas?

 

[Prorege1]

I would like to add my frustration with this issue as well. I'm having a lot of buffering problems, but not on every app in the Apple TV 2021, just the Computers app when playing home videos. Right now, I have been looking at my puppy for about two minutes frozen only 32 seconds into the start of the 6 minute video, because it's just a test.

And this has nothing to do with my Mac or the Apple TV. Both are connected to the router using almost brand new high quality cables. The computer is a brand new Mac Studio Ultra with a 4 TB internal drive that has a speed of 6 GBps. The router is a Motorola MG7550 with Gigabit Ethernet.

I tried resetting both the router and the Apple TV with no change. The videos I find freezing all the time are rather low bitrate, one is a long video in 1080p HEVC 8 bit at like 10 Mbps, the others are tests out of Final Cut Pro, encoding with either FCP or Compressor, but nothing like even 50 Mbps, which this setup should still handle without any problems.

And like I said before, everything else, that comes from the internet, like Netflix, HBOMax, Prime Video, etc, work flawlessly. I have a Spectrum connection that is 300 Mbps down, not that it should matter for this anyway.

If this was a setup where both computer and Apple TV were connected via Wi-Fi, to the 2 Ghz band, and the router was far away, maybe it would make sense. But no, while they're both connected to the Wi-Fi, their primary connection is ethernet, and both are within a few feet of the router.

Any ideas?

I suspect the cable(s) could be at fault.

On the ATV please test the HDMI-connection under "video and sound".
Also download the app Speedtest by Ookla on the ATV and check the results. If you are cabled (presume Cat 6?) you should get a result close to 300 Mbps.

 

[sebalvarez]

On the ATV please test the HDMI-connection under "video and sound".
Also download the app Speedtest by Ookla on the ATV and check the results. If you are cabled (presume Cat 6?) you should get a result close to 300 Mbps.

Oh I already did all that. Speedtest on the ATV gives me around 330 Mbps, and the HDMI connection doesn't have much to do with this particular issue, but I tested that quite a few times and it always passed.

And I tried temporarily switching the ethernet cables, buffering still happening. The cables I have are all CAT 6, with the exception of the one going to the ATV which is CAT 8, but backwards compatible.

This is a matter of a glitch on the Computer app not buffering well enough. I also have a PC I transfer large files to sometimes, and they go at the highest speed of the slowest disk, in this case a mechanical hard drive in the PC.

But that's just file transfer. If we talk about video streaming to a device, before I tried this, my setup was Kodi from either the PC or the far far slower 2015 iMac I had before the Mac Studio, and an Nvidia Shield TV, the cylinder one, also connected by ethernet, and I never had buffering problems at all. Same cables and everything. So that's the obvious proof that this is not my network (and I wouldn't mind admitting if it was and change whatever needs to be changed), but if video can stream perfectly from a PC with a 130 Megabytes per second mechanical drive, you would think that it would have zero problem streaming from a Mac that reaches almost 6 Gigabytes per second:

But Kodi is not exactly elegant, even if it's highly functional and also free. But there's hardly any free way to stream from Kodi for Mac to an Apple TV. So since I will be paying a fortune for this Mac Studio for years to come, I thought, good, I can edit my home videos in FCP, encode in Compressor and play them in my Apple TV. But no. It doesn't work.