My experience with Live TV and Apple TV

[mdastous 2]

Hello,

This is somewhat a follow-up post to a previous post.

For the last months I have been mostly happy with the actual state of Live TV, but one thing kept bugging me: the ability to rewind live stream.
The behavior as been demonstrated in this video. 

During the holidays I decided to mess with all the settings and here is what I found:

1. The rewind issue only occur if you are watching in DirectPlay. (WAD or a bug ?  I couldn't find anything related to that in the documentation)
2. If you decide to change the quality setting to say 1080p 15mbps (i.e activating transcoding), the rewind action start working.
3. When watching live tv with transcoding ON and using the MPV player, I am experiencing the "Edge decoding stuttering", where the viewer will stutter every 5s or so (This is also true on other apple devices such as iPhone or iPad).  To solve the issue, you can pause few seconds, but that's annoying. 
   As a side note, my server is using hardware decoding + HD Graphics 730 GPU, and load is below 10%.
4. You can force the Native player, which will fix the "Edge decoding stuttering" issue (you can see the automatically pausing by it self after few seconds of playing live steam).  Rewind works BUT if you rewind you won't be allowed to go forward anymore unless you restart the stream.

Note:
I tested HDHomeRun "native" app, and even though their UI looks like 1990s, they are able to rewind live stream without any backend server, which makes me believe it's technically possible to have both DirectPlay and rewind action. 

Setup:
Apple TV 4k (A2843)
HDHomeRun CONNECT DUO (HDHR5-2US)

[alex77777 16]

On 1/4/2026 at 9:02 AM, mdastous said:

Hello,

This is somewhat a follow-up post to a previous post.

For the last months I have been mostly happy with the actual state of Live TV, but one thing kept bugging me: the ability to rewind live stream.
The behavior as been demonstrated in this video. 

During the holidays I decided to mess with all the settings and here is what I found:

1. The rewind issue only occur if you are watching in DirectPlay. (WAD or a bug ?  I couldn't find anything related to that in the documentation)
2. If you decide to change the quality setting to say 1080p 15mbps (i.e activating transcoding), the rewind action start working.
3. When watching live tv with transcoding ON and using the MPV player, I am experiencing the "Edge decoding stuttering", where the viewer will stutter every 5s or so (This is also true on other apple devices such as iPhone or iPad).  To solve the issue, you can pause few seconds, but that's annoying. 
   As a side note, my server is using hardware decoding + HD Graphics 730 GPU, and load is below 10%.
4. You can force the Native player, which will fix the "Edge decoding stuttering" issue (you can see the automatically pausing by it self after few seconds of playing live steam).  Rewind works BUT if you rewind you won't be allowed to go forward anymore unless you restart the stream.

Note:
I tested HDHomeRun "native" app, and even though their UI looks like 1990s, they are able to rewind live stream without any backend server, which makes me believe it's technically possible to have both DirectPlay and rewind action. 

Setup:
Apple TV 4k (A2843)
HDHomeRun CONNECT DUO (HDHR5-2US)

The rewind issue has fixed with the more recent versions of Emby Server and the Emby app. I would recommend updating if you haven't already. 

[mdastous 2]

You really gave me hopes, but unfortunately it doesn`t seem to work consistently with me after updating client/server to latest version. 

[Luke 42077]

Hi, we are working on improving it. Thanks for the feedback.

[alex77777 16]

On 2/7/2026 at 1:11 PM, mdastous said:

You really gave me hopes, but unfortunately it doesn`t seem to work consistently with me after updating client/server to latest version. 

Hmm that's odd, I haven't experienced this issue since updating my Emby Server to more recent versions.