A thread for discussing Apple TV issues

Starting up this thread again. I know a lot of people are having issues with our Apple TV app and I wanted to collate some of the issues, starting with @itafroma 's list of issues:

Hi @rorie I am used to watching Giant Bomb exclusively through the Apple TV app, and there are still playback problems as of today.

For context:

• I have both an Apple TV HD (4th gen) and an Apple TV 4k (5th gen, without the Bionic chip). I don't have the latest Apple TV 4K (6th gen, with the Bionic chip) released last year. All the issues I've experienced happen on both Apple TVs I have.
• In the Giant Bomb app, I can only select from three different choices for Video Quality: HD, High, and Low. There is no Medium, Mobile, or 4k option.

These are the issues I'm still experiencing:

• If I set quality to "Low" or "High": no video plays in the latest feed or in the Series feeds. When I select a video, I just get a spinning indicator.
• If I set the quality to "HD": the video for UPF, the Bombcast, and Voicemail Dump Truck all start stuttering after a few seconds (as if the encoding is too high). The audio for those videos continue to play fine. For all other series, video and audio playback work as normal.

This sounds to me like an issue with a mismatch between the encoded files and what Apple TV is seeing. Our first step is going to be to get the encoder to stop sending out 4K files and see if that helps at all (it shouldn't matter since this is happening on a 4K Apple TV but we'll see). If that doesn't help further we'll get the app developer to take a look. Apologies for the trouble and I don't have an ETA on fixing this, unfortunately; it might take some time!

May be helpful to others, but I find the GBFan app generally works, even if set to HD

That is handy and I think I forgot that existed!

As the developer of the GBFan app I can say with 100% certainty that the stuttering issue is a tvOS (4k Apple TVs only) issue (with a hacky development "fix") that I reported to apple (I think over a year ago) and still haven't seen any movement on. @rorie I'd be happy to send my findings/fix to the app developer if you want to connect us together.

The quality issue thing has been happening for a while now and unfortunately seems to be a backend issue as reported in the thread here. I think there's the possibility you can just brute force check for a bunch of different "quality" urls by checking URLs (replacing the bitrates from a known URL with one of the different quality bitrates as they seem to follow a specific pattern) but I haven't bothered to go that far yet. Not sure what other app developers like @conmulligan are doing for it.

@rorie A number of videos seem to be missing a HD or high quality when returned from the API for whatever reason. A quick run on xcode reveals the following videos are having issues (though some might be old enough they never had the appropriate quality):

VIDEO id 17366 Jeff Bakalar's Mandalorian Pinball Stream Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17537 PokeMonday Night Combat - Alpha Hunt Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17194 PowerBombcast 28: All Out 2021 Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17144 Garage Talk 9 Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17433 Tamoor Hussain is Possessed by Nostalgia - Guilty Treasures #04 Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17363 Bak 2 Skool 12: FINALS Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17231 VoidBurger's Hot Takeouts: Why We Can't Escape Firewatch Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17353 Ranking of Evil 04 Missing high video url!

VIDEO id 17734 Quick Look: Salt and Sacrifice Missing HD video url!

Thanks for creating this thread!

The fact that this is probably a tvOS bug and not related to Giant Bomb seems to make sense: today I noticed the latest round of the series I reported all work fine, so I went back and tried all the videos that had poor playback for me and now they are working fine when set to HD quality on both Apple TVs I have.

The spinning indicator for High or Low quality is still happening, but since HD now works, my concerns are addressed.

Hi again,

No idea what is going on now:

• Giant Bombcast 737 is stuttering
• UPF 05/06/22 is fine
• Voicemail Dump Truck 021 is stuttering

All other shows continue to work just fine.

Just tried the GBFan app: all the above videos work just fine there.

Just FYI we should be able to remove the 4k versions of videos in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully that will adjust the official app to be a bit more usable, but we'll see! Apologies for the time that it's taken!

No worries Rorie, thanks for the update!

It's a great idea to create a thread where all forum users can write nasty things about Apple. I'm starting to get frustrated with this company over time. Yes, the new Mac that came out in 2022 still inspires me. However, they stop making pleasant surprises to their customers. Apple removes charging from boxes with iPhones and will soon remove the input for headphones and chargers so that everyone uses wireless headphones and charging. Of course, it's terrible. On https://zumroad.com/tech, I read a lot of news about possible innovations and many interesting but sad things about Apple. If I start writing about Apple TV now, I'll have to write a whole novel here in the thread...