Stutter on playback seems to be tvOS not handling large bitrates

[CoolPiotr 0]

I've recently built a massive UnRAID server, so I've been reencoding my movies into giant original compression MKVs straight from Blu-ray. I just recently ripped my copy of The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition, and I saw that on playback there was a stutter; a stutter which didn't show up on the few other movies I'd already done. I found two ways to fix it, which seem to point to the tvOS player choking a little on high bitrate files. One is to change the player back to MPV; the other is to force your Home Network Quality to "1080p - 40 Mbps" (or lower, I presume) in the Playback options. Both eliminate the problem. Here are my details: 

Emby Server: 4.5.4.0

Apple TV Emby App: 1.5.0 (2)

Apple TV 4K hardware with physical gigabit Ethernet connection

The Fellowship of the Ring: bitrate = 41,150 kbps

Interestingly, Atomic Blonde comes in with a bitrate of 40,992 kbps, nearly the same, and it played fine using the native tvOS player. So maybe that player has a cutoff at 41000? I can't imagine why, but I can't imagine why one would be fine and not the other either, not with numbers that close.

I should add that LOTR was playing fine on my iPad over wifi too. Which I'm assuming was also transcoded due to bandwidth, so there's no problem with transcoded content.

In the end I chose to go with the MPV player and leave my bandwidth at Auto.

Hopefully this information is useful to the developers.

 

[ebr 14910]

Hi.  Thanks for the information.  You are probably right as the internal Apple player is designed for streaming media.

18 hours ago, CoolPiotr said:

The Fellowship of the Ring: bitrate = 41,150 kbps

Interestingly, Atomic Blonde comes in with a bitrate of 40,992 kbps,

Those are undoubtedly averages and the actual bitrates of the files vary with different scenes.