The photos and videos shot on iPhone are blurry when viewed on my Apple TV’s photos app. I use iCloud photos to seamlessly view my photos on my MacBook and on my Apple Tv. Some of the videos shot are very blurry and lack quality when viewed on my Apple tv. What could be the reason for this? Please help me with a solution
Apple TV HD, tvOS 17
tvOS (AppleTV 4K) does not have a user adjustable "Optimize Storage" setting as it only caches all content temporarily. All photo's are downloaded immediately in full quality when shown on screen. Video's too.
The issue is probably the encoding of the files. Photo's on AppleTV usually look fine when they are not shot with HDR on the iPhone. Most TV's use LCD panels and these inherently do not display HDR very well.
Same is with video, HDR just doesn't look great on LCD (TV, Mac's and PC's even worse). I've got some indoor shots that look fine on the iPhone 13 OLED display, but show very blocky and (MPEG) blurry on our LCD TV. The conversion from HEVC, ITU-T H.265 to Dolby Vision on our ATV 4K (2017 model) just looks horrible.
Maybe the results are different on newer ATV 4K models that have (hardware) H.265 support. I don't own the newest model at this moment.
For now I've turned off HDR on video recording on our iPhones. For photo's I've kept HDR turned on as they look good enough on a Panasonic 4K TV with Dolby Vision. Same photo's look horrible on a Samsung 4K... but that seems to be "the normal" on Samsung.
tvOS (AppleTV 4K) does not have a user adjustable "Optimize Storage" setting as it only caches all content temporarily. All photo's are downloaded immediately in full quality when shown on screen. Video's too.
The issue is probably the encoding of the files. Photo's on AppleTV usually look fine when they are not shot with HDR on the iPhone. Most TV's use LCD panels and these inherently do not display HDR very well.
Same is with video, HDR just doesn't look great on LCD (TV, Mac's and PC's even worse). I've got some indoor shots that look fine on the iPhone 13 OLED display, but show very blocky and (MPEG) blurry on our LCD TV. The conversion from HEVC, ITU-T H.265 to Dolby Vision on our ATV 4K (2017 model) just looks horrible.
Maybe the results are different on newer ATV 4K models that have (hardware) H.265 support. I don't own the newest model at this moment.
For now I've turned off HDR on video recording on our iPhones. For photo's I've kept HDR turned on as they look good enough on a Panasonic 4K TV with Dolby Vision. Same photo's look horrible on a Samsung 4K... but that seems to be "the normal" on Samsung.
Do you have "Optimize Storage" set on your TV's Photos>Settings>iCloud? If so, it may only have a lower resolution image to work with. Photos will grab the fill sized image when you Edit or Zoom in, so try that. Just hitting Edit (just hit Return) may force the TV to download the higher resolution version.
I don't have an Apple TV, and I can't test it, so let us know what happens...
Videos are blurry on Apple TV
