Random drop-outs/pauses with Apple TV

TidBITS Talk
1

I wonder if anyone else seeing this after a recent AppleTV software update?

Current AppleTV, bang uptodate.

Just had fibre installed to replace our original copper feed (same provider).

We watch most of our TV (even live) via the ATV rather than OTA.

Randomly we will get a spinning paddle. never had that before to the same frequency.

Sometimes the picture will stop but the sound continues.

Sometimes it’s the other way round.

Sometime both stop.

Occasionally, pressing pause on the remote will fix it, but not every time.

Generally i have to restart the AppleTV and all’s well till the next time.

I was just playing music to my HomePods and it went off. reacting the ATV brought it back.

My significant other is getting annoyed now when she’s having a binge on something.

Help!

2

I guess the first thing I would do is see if you can free up some memory. The Apple TV seems very susceptible to that type of problem. Go to Settings, General, Manage Storage and see if there are apps you can delete, or at least Offload. Restart and see if that helps.

I hope a new version of the Apple TV device has more memory, though with the current pricing, it may not.

1 Like
3

I have experienced the same symptoms. I was using VLC to play video located on a drive on a Mac on my LAN, playing and being viewed on a different Mac on the LAN. The video was accessed via Home Sharing. I think iCloud/Home Sharing controls file access between the two Macs, with the video transferred only over the LAN (not to iCloud). Delays and stuttering occur, then go away, at random times. Home Sharing frequently turns itself off, sometimes even while playing a video. I have an Apple TV 4K on the LAN, but it is not used in this video viewing.

The symptoms FishTickler and I see seem the same, but our systems are very different. What our systems have in common is intermittent breaks in video transfer via a LAN.

About a year ago I moved to a larger, recently renovated, three story house. During renovation CAT6 ethernet had been installed. I had never done much with networking, including ethernet, but figured now was time to learn. I bought a Ubiquiti Dream 7 console and began. I am still working at learning.

During this time two things have become clear. First, the state of the art is a mess. Multiple vendors, multiple protocols and conventions, multiple security features in many versions, trying to connect equipment of various ages, … Second, the top priority while muddling through the mess, should be system security. The LAN is connected to the WAN (Wide Area Network, aka The Internet), where The Bad Guys lurk, and The Bad Guys are more and more skilled and aggressive.

This is the background within which playing video on an Apple TV, or a Mac, works, to the extent that it does. I suspect the problems we are seeing are due to network glitches in our LANs. As I understand it, Apple’s tvOS is derived from iOS, and iOS originated by stripping as much as possible from macOS (OS X), to leave a relatively simple, low energy requiring, and secure single user System.

In the world of video viewing on a LAN, problems such as lags and stuttering are solved by creating a dedicated Virtual LAN (VLAN), routing video and only video over it, and prioritizing its packets at switches. Other VLANs are created, and other network traffic routed to them. The ability to manage such complexities is the sort of thing that was stripped out to create iOS, so it is still missing in tvOS. In contrast, the UniFi Network application works well for VLAN creation and management. In my experience, macOS (or iOS) System Settings / Network then has problems with the LAN with multiple VLANs created by UniFi Network.

I suspect the random dropouts and pauses we have seen in video originate in timing issues with causes somewhere in this hodge-podge of LAN interactions. More RAM or faster processing somewhere might suffice as a work around, but I suspect the essence of the issue is network anomalies.

4

I have five Apple TVs, most of them on 26.4 (I haven’t checked them all, I know they are all at 26.3.x or later.)

We do not have that problem. We use the Apple TV for all TV watching - YouTube TV for conventional TV channels, plus several discrete apps.

Network is copper (here at my main house - my summer house, which has one Apple TV, has fiber), 1 Gb/s download, 50 Mb/s upload speed. I use the quad9 for DNS, though I’ve used the ISP’s DNS (Spectrum) and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 in the past without any buffering issues like that.

Most of the Apple TVs are connected by 100 mb/s ethernet (old wiring in the walls), though one uses WiFi. Three are Apple TV HD units, two are Apple TV 4K. No HomePods - I use an old Yamaha soundbar on one TV, Sonos Amp on another, and the other three use the TV speakers (though one of them I almost always use with my AirPods.) The one in my basement is used almost exclusively for Fitness+ workouts, the one in our bedroom we occasionally watch the news or sports events when we go to bed, the other three are used a lot more.

Have you done a speed test on your new fiber connection, to see if there is any latency on the ISP connection?

2 Likes
5

Good suggestion. Installing a speed testing app directly on the Apple TV might also be helpful.

1 Like
6

This has started to happen to me this week as well - AppleTV 4k, AT&T fiber, nothing has changed (other than an update to the AppleTV OS on Tuesday) but now I frequently get a momentary black screen and or a momentary loss of sound.

1 Like
7

Same momentary dark screen but not very frequent. This includes local content such as homesharing from an iMac and HDHomerun OTA Tv tuner - all connected with ethernet.
I have just tried managing storage, as suggested above. Let’s see if that helps.

8

Thanks all.

Glad to know I’m not on my own.

Speedtest is ok but does seem to vary a lot more than it used to.

I removed all of the apps that we no-longer use.

Paused and stuttered as before!

1 Like
9

This may have fixed my problem (too early to tell, but seems promising so far):

In Settings > Video and Audio > Audio Format, temporarily switch to Change Format on and test Dolby Digital 5.1 (turning Dolby Atmos off)

1 Like
10

This may have worked here too.

I switched from auto to stereo (just using two homepod minis) and yesterday evening was stutter free.

11

I began experiencing these blackouts shortly after replacement of Xfinity’s cable “modem”. It turned out to be interference from that Xfinity router — even though the TV box was using Ethernet.The solution was either of these two: Move the Apple TV box farther away (at least two meters) or cover it in a faraday cage (foil or mesh). Problem gone.

2 Likes
12

After my cable company did away with set top boxes and switched to Internet feed, I started using my  TV 4K to send it to the TV back in 2024. I have noticed the the audio doesn’t sync well with people’s lips, but that may be due to using the ARC to send the audio to my A/V receiver.

13

Since switching the audio to stereo I haven’t had a problem with dropouts and stuttering.

Thanks fir the suggestion.

1 Like
14

Being May the 4th :person_fencing: I decided to watch Star Wars A New Hope last night. The dark “flashes” were very noticable and irritating during fight sequences such as between Darth Vader and Obi One. I suspect it has something to do with the TV and Apple TV trying to co-operate when frame changes occur, resulting in a momentary loss of video. It happens with a Hisense TV also with a projector (so unlikely to be a cable or TV/projector issue). I do have an HDMI splitter to send the video to TV and projector but bypassing this doesn’t fix the problem.

Watching the same fight sequence (and same movie file) with Quicktime on an iMac there were no dark flashes.

This seems to have started with a recent update to tvOS. I have looked online for solutions but nothing seems to work. I hope Apple is aware of the issue.

15

I suspect this last tvOS update is quite buggy, causing all these problems people are experiencing. On my Apple TV, I use Channels to watch TV, and fairly often the video slows to a crawl while the audio keeps going. This problem has happened with both live TV and recorded shows. If I restart the app, the problem goes away for a while.

Another problem involves powering the Apple TV on and off. The TV used to reliably turn on or off with the Apple TV. But lately, there have been instances where the TV doesn’t turn on when I turn the Apple TV on, the TV turns on but isn’t set to the Apple TV input, and the Apple TV turns off but leaves the TV on.

Last night, the Apple TV stopped responding as a Home hub, disabling some functions on the smart lock on the front door.

16

Although there are bugs in the latest tvOS it sounds like cabling issues in your case. I too had unreliable waking of the TV when Apple TV started, until I replaced the HDMI cable.

Homekit issues are often due to flaky wifi or ethernet. Restarting the router might help. Otherwise an ethernet cable might be loose or deteriorated or an ethernet hub needs replacing.

For wifi, radio interference can be a nuisance - manually setting channels on the router might help. Another trick is to assign a static IP to the Apple TV in the router settings.

(these are all things I have experienced over the years but the list is by no means complete!)

1 Like