Apple TV; Homepod as default speaker; wifi bandwidth drop

Hi all,

I have had the same issue for ages and have found an unusual solution. Symptoms were the same: loads of buffering, constant freezing, playing from one speaker. Almost unwatchable. ATV connected through Ethernet and HomePods on a separate 5GHz SSID with no other devices on it.

I changed the HDMI cable today from the one supplied in the box from Apple to the one supplied with my 4k BT YouView box. Problem instantly sorted. I bought the 4k ATV when first released (pre-Dolby Atmos?) so maybe cable shipped at the time couldn’t handle it. Just a theory. Anyway, all now working perfectly. Hope that helps somebody.

I thought your post was curious.

So, I set up Home Pods as the Apple TV 4K speakers and I did not experience your issue.

Did you re-calibrate the HomePod after you made it the Apple TV speaker? (wireless Audio Sync)

I did the test with the ethernet cable.

Speedtest is way better (almost 1Gb/sec) and does not show a decrease of bandwith when I select the HomePod as Default audio output. (that's kind of expected...)

However, my test movie (Ready Player One) stops after a while and I get sometimes a weird error message saying basically (I'm translate from French) that my "Apple TV" has not been able to connect to "Apple TV Living Room" and I have a choice :

"Retry" or "Change the default audio output"

What is very strange is that message does not talk about the Home pod... it really says that my Apple TV is not connecting to my Apple TV !?! (From the Home app on my iPhone, my HomePod is named "HomePod".)

Anyways... still can't enjoy Dolby Atmos more that 10 minutes... very disapointting...

Breakthrough!!! Today I bought a high speed hdmi cable to replace the cheap hdmi cable I was using. After installing I have been testing for the last couple of hours and have had no dropouts of audio or video. I will continue to test over the next couple of days and report back but for now this seems to have cured the issue.

Same problem here. Apple TV with TVOS 14.2 and 14.3 paired with dual Homepods reduces wifi bandwidth from 240+Mbps to ~ 20Mbps...effectively 1/10th of normal bandwidth. Although mine's reduced even if I first switch to TV speakers and then airplay to Homepods.

Other wifi (and wired) devices still show full 240 wifi bandwidth available, so it only affects ATV when paired. But this makes streaming movies impossible...buffering every 5-10 seconds.

I have since reported this incident to Apple Support and it's been escalated all the way to the engineers for the HomePod. I also later ran across this post on Macrumors referencing the same problem. I tried their solution of putting ATV and both HomePods on 5G band with no result. I will say I did not specifically separate my wifi into 2.4 and 5G SSIDs. They're still merged into one SSID, but I confirmed ATV and HomePods are all on the 5G band.

I have the

same problem.

I did the

test with several Wifi Routers with no luck: bandwith tests with the speedtest

app drop from 375Mb/sec to 76Mb/sec just by setting the default audio output to

the HomePod)

Beyond the

wifi bandwidth drop, video streams stop playing (the HomeProd probably lose it

and switch back automatically to TV Speaker and come back to the HomePod few

seconds after). This happens on Netflix or rented video from the Apple Movie

Store.

I’m using

tvOS 14.3 and HomePod is 14.3 as well.

I reported my experience with this on December 17th. The analyst I've been working with is great...getting back to me every few days with updates. Albeit, so far the updates are that there's no word from the engineers on this. However, hopefully with other tickets being submitted for the same issue this will start to take on importance.

It seems we're able to stream from Netflix and other online services with the HomePods paired to ATV, but that's only because the sliver of bandwidth we're left with is actually still enough to do so. But I have content on a local server in my house that buffers every 3-5 seconds...it's bad.

The ONLY thing I haven't tried is hardwiring the ATV which I thought I might do today...but Myers6486 indicated he's having the problem even hard-wired. So this is really getting interesting/annoying.

I have tried everythingthat makes sense; reset of Homepods, two different routers, and force 2.4 only. My atv is hooked up via Ethernet and all have the latest software.

the only options I have left are force 5ghz, setup atv on WiFi.

No I did not re-calibrate. (I did not notice any time shift between video and audio actually..)

So I've just done what you suggestd and tested again after audio calibration : Same problem. ( the "Ready Player One" car race at the begining of the movie did not make it til the end : it froze about 4 minutes after I started playing.)

Speedtest shows the same huge difference having defaut audio set to the HomePod or not.

I spoke to Apple yesterday and put in a support ticket. They had me send the analytics and take a video of it happening. They sent it to the engineers to take a look. Hopefully I will learn some more in a few days.

I also have an ATV 4K with stereo Homepods as default audio output and have not noticed wifi problems after updating to 14.3. However my ATV is connected by ethernet cable, not wifi.

I hope that an attempt by Apple to fix your problem does not break my system :)

The Homepod default feature has already wrecked Airplaying directly to the Homepods from other Apple devices - they must all go through the ATV.

Same thing happening here with Apple TV plugged in via Ethernet.

Well the loading of videos is now working correctly but every now and again the audio drops from one speaker and the comes back on within a couple of seconds.