Minor Video Stutter

i I don't hink you're talking about this, but is this what you're seeing.....
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2597397&tstart=0

Also, what do you mean by missing the 1080? Although the old TV would up convert, it never played 1080i/p.

I'm seeing some stuttering as well. Every few minutes the picture will just skip (a few dropped frames). No problem with the audio. This is happening on purchased itunes video (HD) and on handbrake encoded video Atv v1 settings. The server is gigabit backbone to wireless N to the atv. Stuttering happens when the progress bar shows a full buffer (IE the video is fully cached). Standard HDMI out to the sharp 720p tv.

The old aTV played these videos without a single skip.

It's pretty insidious, you don't notice it until you do and then you can't stop noticing -- it's really a downer.

Best guess to the problem: While the video is playing the atv v2 is getting an updated playlist from the itunes server. My library is very large, 1.5tb purchased itunes videos, over 5k mp3s, 5g of pictures, and another tb of ripped home movies, handbrake encoded to atv v1 settings.

Anyway it's pretty distracting.

Other annoyances with atv v2:
* Can't log into a netflix account using a gmail address that contains a + (used to alias email addresses)
* [HD] doesn't show beside HD video anymore.
* Movies can no longer be subgrouped by setting show and episode id4 data (So you can't group all your James Bond movies together).
* TV shows are no longer subgroupped by show, each season is displayed in the master list.
* My local movie and tv list is no longer grouped under movie and tv on the master menu.

pcx99 wrote:
I'm seeing some stuttering as well. Every few minutes the picture will just skip (a few dropped frames). No problem with the audio. This is happening on purchased itunes video (HD) and on handbrake encoded video Atv v1 settings. The server is gigabit backbone to wireless N to the atv. Stuttering happens when the progress bar shows a full buffer (IE the video is fully cached). Standard HDMI out to the sharp 720p tv.

The old aTV played these videos without a single skip.

This is worrying - the one thing I assumed they would have ironed out was any video/audio glitches due to network/AppleTV hardware performance issues that affected many with generation 1 devices. It's really a black mark for a media device not to play video perfectly without dropping frames etc

It's pretty insidious, you don't notice it until you do and then you can't stop noticing -- it's really a downer.

I bet

Best guess to the problem: While the video is playing the atv v2 is getting an updated playlist from the itunes server. My library is very large, 1.5tb purchased itunes videos, over 5k mp3s, 5g of pictures, and another tb of ripped home movies, handbrake encoded to atv v1 settings.

That may be the case or it's buffering ahead enough but something else is sleeping and not waking quickly and causing a pause until the stream resumes.

Anyway it's pretty distracting.

Ys, and not one you can troubleshoot synced vs streamed on new unit.

Other annoyances with atv v2:
* Can't log into a netflix account using a gmail address that contains a + (used to alias email addresses)

Suspect that's a simple fix.

* [HD] doesn't show beside HD video anymore.

Conflicting reports on that. The logo irritated me to be honest.

* Movies can no longer be subgrouped by setting show and episode id4 data (So you can't group all your James Bond movies together).

I tended to use genres almost exclusively rather than this but a real retrograde step for those who did.

* TV shows are no longer subgroupped by show, each season is displayed in the master list.

So insetad of say Lost a sa top heading and seasons listed nested within that, I assume you get a top level entry for every season of Lost - is that correct?

I really really hope it's at the very least grouping by season and not showing every individual episode in the top level!

What happens if you use Get Info to change all episodes say to Season 1? - if episode numbers were then set to say 101-106, 201-206, 301-306 etc it might be a workaround to tidy things up.

* My local movie and tv list is no longer grouped under movie and tv on the master menu.

Of course not. My biggest complaint with AppleTV Software 2 on generation 1 devices was it was far too iTunes store centric with your own content relegated to the bottom of commercial menus. Software 3.0+ was near perfect especially if you disabled the store.

Now with AppleTV 2.0 the marketing boffins have clearly decided that iTunes Store rental is the primary reason anyone would/should buy the device to generate iTMS revenue, so yet again your stuff, paid for or home video, is relegated to a submenu - at least that seems to have a FrontRow/AppleTV 1 software 1 simplicity.

Same stuttering happens on my MBP. It's because Apple's developers still haven't figured out how to get videos to stream properly. You don't see this kind of crap on a Windows machine. My computer's more than fast enough to handle streaming movies, yet I constantly get random stuttering. It's really quite annoying. Can't watch 1080p videos either.

Tristan Block wrote:
Same stuttering happens on my MBP. It's because Apple's developers still haven't figured out how to get videos to stream properly. You don't see this kind of crap on a Windows machine. My computer's more than fast enough to handle streaming movies, yet I constantly get random stuttering. It's really quite annoying. Can't watch 1080p videos either.

It really is a fundamental thing to get right on a streaming media player, and if we're seeing it on the new model, it probably had nothing to do with poorer resources on the old unit.

You nailed it, AC. One, with all the time I feel they've probably had, they should have had streaming and playback nailed before releasing it - and HDMI output. Two, With all the complaints about the last TV OS update, this new version is even more centered on iTunes.

I posted about this in the Handbrake forums, but no one there saw what I was seeing. I'm seeing this with movies I converted with Handbrake. I think these are playing fine on my iPhone 4 (the screen is so small that it's hard to say for certain) and they play fine with an Acer Revo nettop, but on my new Apple TV there's a definite stutter/judder/dropped frame/glitch whatever you might call it). Rewinding and replaying the same scene will usually result in the glitch being in a somewhat different spot, but I usually can spot a glitch at least once every 30 seconds (if not even more frequently). As was already stated, I still have this problem even if I let the movie completely load to the buffer, so I don't think it's accurate to refer to this as a "streaming" issue. If any of you who are seeing this issue have access to an iPad, I'd like to know if that plays the files smoothly. As I said, my iPhone 4 appears to not have the issue. I'm hoping that enough of us will see this issue and complain about it and that it's something that Apple can fix. One concern I have is that it could be due to insufficient RAM. The iPhone 4 has 512MB, but the iPad and Apple TV only have 256MB, so that's another good reason to test it out on the iPad. If it plays smoothly there, it will give me hope that they can fix it.

I neglected to mention that I tried playing a couple of HD movie trailers yesterday and I'm pretty sure that I did not see any issues with them. So another theory is that there's something slightly different about how Handbrake is encoding these videos (compared to Apple's source material), and which was not an issue with the old Apple TV, but which could hopefully be fixed by the Handbrake team. I'm not eager to pay for movie or TV show rentals, but I'll probably rent something at some point and can pay closer attention to that aspect to see if the Apple HD movies are free from this issue or exhibit it as well.

The issue was present watching grey's anatomy season 7 episode 2 HD, which was an itunes purchase. So this is not limited to handbrake encodes. The issues does NOT appear to be present while the video is being streamed (IE while watching the video press the down button and the progress bar has not gone all white). The issue manifests after the buffer has been filled (IE, press the down button and the progress bar is all white).

This is important because it seems the atv, once it has fully buffered the video, decides it can do a few background tasks and one of those tasks is interfering with playback. My best guess at the moment is that every few minutes it gets an updated library listing from the local itunes server and if the list is too large the video stutter happens when the itv is trying to figure out if anything changed.

So you're less likely to get video stutter events while streaming from the internet because those streams do not download as fast as the streams over your local network which keeps the atv in a state where it doesn't attempt any background tasks for a longer period of time.

That is an interesting theory, but I'm pretty sure that I experienced issues when streaming across my network even before the entire movie was "downloaded" to the aTV's buffer. I will test again to confirm. I will say that, either by fluke or due to something along the lines of your theory, I seemed to encounter fewer issues when streaming from my laptop over 802.11n through the network and to my aTV then when I was streaming from my desktop over gigabit ethernet through the AirPort Extreme and to the aTV via ethernet (100mbps on that last leg). Again, this seemed like a fluke to me (due to it being counterintuitive), and I only tried it once, but I'll try that again as well, because it might support your theory that when the network speed is slower the aTV dedicates itself to streaming/displaying the content and when the content is fully buffered (or perhaps still streaming, but streaming fast enough such that it doesn't need to worry about running out of buffer) that it starts to do other things in the background.

Do you have access to an iPhone 4 or, better yet, an iPad? If so, can you test out playing a video you've experienced problems with on that? Again, the iPad would be ideal since it shares the same amount of RAM as the aTV and one theory/concern would be that 256MB isn't sufficient for flawless playback.

As I believe I stated, the Handbrake encode I was using for testing appeared to play fine on my iPhone 4, but the screen is so small that it's possible that I'm just not seeing it.

I had this a while ago, so I restarted the ATV2 and its fine now.
Its not a streaming problem. The new model loads the whole movie onto the flash memory (and it stays there even if you reboot) it was dropping frames even when it was fully loaded.
Playback was perfect again.

I am experiencing the same issues as you under the same circumstances. It is definitely happening at sporadic locations during playback, not graphically intensive scenes. I like your theory about a background process interfering with playback at intervals after the buffer is full. That is consistent with what I am seeing.

I'm having the stutter issues -- intermittent frame dropping with audio issues at the same time -- on my new Apple TV, and I have an iPhone 4 and an iPad, and neither of those devices has any issues with playback of the same HD movies.

At first I thought maybe it was a streaming problem with the Apple TV, but then I paused the HD movie I was watching and let it buffer completely (the white bar was full, so the movie had completely buffered to the Apple TV's flash drive). Even after it had buffered, the video stuttering started 4 minutes into the movie.

It doesn't do it at the same spots in the movie either -- I'd stop the movie, rewind a bit, play the same section and it would play without stutter, but then another section would stutter. I tried a different movie, same result. I ended up just putting the movie on my iPad and watching it on there, as I couldn't deal with it on the new Apple TV.

What is interesting for me is it only seems to happen with HD movies. My kids have watched several standard def movies like Madagascar, etc., and there has been no stutter. Netflix streaming has been fine.

It also takes forever to load my shared library which is ridiculous. Sometimes it will just get stuck, saying it is loading my library, and I just have to hit the menu button to back out and do it again.

My 1st gen Apple TV has none of these problems. I'm trying to decide if I should just return this new Apple TV (I still have the first gen one, I just wanted the new one also so we have two in the house -- especially since it has the Netflix streaming option).

The question is -- is this thing a pile of crap or can this be fixed with a firmware update? It seems like a lot of us are having the same issues, so it makes me think they'll fix it with firmware, but it makes me nervous if I can't watch HD movies on it, since I have a lot of those now in my iTunes library. If the HD movies don't work, it's not worth $99 just for Netflix streaming.