Skipping forwards sometimes forces whole TVos to crawl

After doing a bunch of “skip forward 10 seconds” actions on a piece of video content, Infuse slowed to a crawl – and took the whole of TVos with it until reboot. What could be causing this?

Symptoms:

  • content played fine until I started skipping through it, then:
  • audio replay at full speed, but image updating about 1 frame/second
  • after exiting Infuse, all other TVos apps exhibit similar symptoms (eg Netflix stuttering when trying to display startup logo; BBC iPlayer etc)
  • at this time system menus were also unreliable (remote control actions sometimes ignored or doubled)
  • this continued until system reboot
  • however I was able to stream successfully to Infuse on an iPad, suggesting the problem is on the AppleTV not the NAS.

It’s as though TVos had run out of memory or something in the background was interrupting at a high rate.

System:

  • AppleTV 4k, TVos 13.0, latest Infuse update
  • wired ethernet to Synology, using NFS (also tried SMB, same issue)
  • replicated on at least two different pieces of content so far
  • playing 1080p Blu-ray rip (from MakeMKV)

Media (as described by VLC):

  • MPEG-H Part 2/HEVC (H.265) (hvc1) 1920x960
  • frame rate 25
  • audio streams MPEG AAC and A52 (AC3)

Welcome to the forum!

I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this before, but if this happens again and you are able to submit a report from your Apple TV we’d definitely like to look into what may be going on here.

More info on submitting reports can be found here.

I have successfully replicated this (not hard: just took episode 1 of Chernobyl and flipped backwards and forwards for a bit until the above symptoms occurred). I have submitted a support log as requested.

Thanks. We’ll take a look.

Just to advise that this is still happening. Everything is fine until I started flipping through an episode by pressing the forward button on the controlled, plus a bit of winding forwards and backwards. Then the entire system slows to a crawl until reboot.

I thought this issue had gone away with a tvOS update but it has not. Skipping forward too many times eventually causes the entire appletv to slow to a crawl and stay that way until reboot.

I think I have triggered the same problem when using Netflix but I am not so sure. It seems easier to replicate with Infuse.

I’m not sure if this is related or not but I too experience a complete slow down with my Apple TV4K when trying to scrub forward on a movie. It either locks up Infuse or throws me an error. The Apple TV will work fine after force closing the app but I can’t scrub forward in a movie.

The odd thing is when I open the app back up, it will allow me to resume from that same spot I scrubbed to.