Thanks for the in-depth analysis and recommendations, David!
An extra note: in last night’s new episode, no black screen (in HDR), and no idea why it unless they heard the complaints and adjusted to HDR10…
I also watched last night’s episode without issues. More generally, I will look at Dave’s advice regarding TV cables as I am getting an occasional brief fogginess with the video. I hadn’t realised the updates to the “quality” of streaming services might make old cables redundant.
That’s unlikely to be cables. I’ve seen total dropouts (black screens) and artifacts (regions where the color is flat-out wrong, like green or magenta lines across the screen) caused by bad cables.
Fogginess (fuzziness?), in my experience is usually caused by network glitches. Reduced network bandwidth causes the player and server to renegotiate to a lower-bandwidth stream, which often looks fuzzy, or pixelated or may result in dropped frames (jerky motion). Until more bandwidth becomes available and then they negotiate back up again.
It can also be caused by your device failing to complete HDCP negotiation. Some devices respond to this by degrading the picture quality (and other devices just refuse to play video altogether). Which could be caused by cables that are losing signal, but I would expect you to see that kind of degradation all the time, not just for certain programs or at certain times of day.
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