Hello all!

Recently finally got a 4K HDR TV to go with my Apple TV 4K.

As far as I can tell, neither the Apple TV 4K’s Movies app nor macOS’s AppleTV app ever download the 4K media for local storage, but they always stream from Apple’s servers. Does anyone know of any documentation on this, and how the bitrate is determined? On iOS I see the file sizes for downloads for HD and below, but not 4K. On macOS, I see only HD as download option, and only streaming options for 4K (I was hoping to use Home Sharing from my mac perhaps).

I’m looking at getting the absolute maximum image quality, and when streaming from other services I’ve noticed some artifacting (color banding in gradients) that I think are related to the encoding and/or bitrate.

Thanks for any info! Google or ChatGPT did not help me much (I think mostly because ‘4K’ is in the product name).

  • Garnoch@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I see a lot of good info here, but it also comes down to the TV of course. My parents recently bought a new 4k HDR TV, but it was cheap. I talked them into bumping up one model, but that’s as far as they would go. They love it, but I can see that “color banding in gradients” issue you talked about, which my TV doesn’t have. I didn’t point it out to them though.