[hn_check]

"I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation)."

How don't more people complain about this? I avoid streaming on the Apple TV because it does some sort of bizarre framerate thunking that is just brutal for panning. Do so few people use the product that it just goes unnoticed?

My LG 4K TV has fantastic Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ clients. HDR, 4K, etc.

[AnssiH]

I believe most people just don't notice the judder, and many of the rest don't care. E.g. it took a lot of convincing to get Google to add "use 50p output" to Chromecast settings years ago (and that didn't fix 24p of course, just European 25p/50p which is more severely affected).

Also, most high-end TVs are able to recover the original 24p (or other) frame rate and thus remove the judder by using specific settings: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/c9-oled/settings#judder

I tested with a high-speed camera that with correct settings my old Samsung UE75H6475 was able to recover the original frame rate perfectly from quite a few framerate mangling combinations. Haven't done similar testing with my current C9, though.

[hn_check]

"I believe most people just don't notice the judder, and many of the rest don't care"

This is probably the case. DAZN took over NFL streaming in Canada and for the first two years seemed to use their existing European soccer processing chain (they might still --- I gave it a try to years straight and then gave up). So the 60/30 NFL stream was re-encoded to 25/50, and then on playback on my set would be displayed at 30/60. It was brutal, and even if displayed at 25 or 50 FPS was still brutal because they were seriously corrupting the NFL stream.

I tried it across a number of devices -- AppleTV, Chromecast, different TVs, pads, laptops -- and it was just unbelievably intolerable to me. Every panning pass was the horrendous juddering mess. Yet somehow no one seemed to have a problem with this! In discussions it seemed to be a non-issue.

[charrondev]

I also have a 4K LG TV and “frame rate thunking” is the perfect term to describe it.

I wish it would just give the direct output to the TV and receiver (video audio). No idea why they the need to process it all on device.

[sjwright]

Have you tried turning “match frame rate” on?

[charrondev]

I had tried it a while back stopped because anytime you go into or out of video streaming it would black out the whole screen for a second or two before starting to buffer the content. It’s particularly annoying if trying to search for a particular episode of something.

That’s probably the ticket for it though. I find the lack of audio pass through to be the more annoying piece though. I have a machine that costs significantly more than the Apple TV and has knowledge of all of the attached speakers to do that decoding.

[thirdsun]

> I had tried it a while back stopped because anytime you go into or out of video streaming it would black out the whole screen for a second or two before starting to buffer the content. It’s particularly annoying if trying to search for a particular episode of something.

That‘s the correct behavior though and not specific to the Apple TV. Any device that actually does switch and match the content’s frame rate will cause the output display to resync/adjust with a short black screen. The alternative of not adjusting frame rate is much worse and it’s such an underrated problem in video playback in my opinion. The Apple TV handles this better than most devices.