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jent

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 31, 2010
899
659
Ever since upgrading from the Apple TV HD to the Apple TV 4K released this year, I've noticed that most content I watch, regardless of streaming platform, has frequent visual artifacts. It seems to happen in areas where there is motion and with finely-detailed patterns, which leads me to believe it's some sort of automated conversion of 30fps content to 60fps where the Apple TV is trying to create those in-between frames and messing up on certain parts. I'm not sure what the technical word is but I'm thinking of the equivalent of how artificially creating higher-resolution content with AI is called upscaling, I assume the Apple TV is doing this for frames per second on-the-fly. I could be totally wrong and am happy to elaborate. The television is a 2016 Samsung 4K UHD TV.

The most obvious example is when I'm watching hockey, instead of seeing the single black puck, I see a sort of ghost puck right before and after the real puck, which furthered my idea that the Apple TV is trying to create additional frames based on an algorithm. Anyways, just curious about this and I'd like to disable it since I have no problem consuming content in its original format. Thank you!
 

priitv8

macrumors 601
Jan 13, 2011
4,078
660
Estonia
Also check the motion smoothing effects on your TV and see if changing them or turning completely off, will have any effect?
 
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jent

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 31, 2010
899
659
Also check the motion smoothing effects on your TV and see if changing them or turning completely off, will have any effect?
Will do! I should add that I noticed this only when using my new Apple TV 4K (2021) and not when using the Apple TV HD (despite using the same HDMI cable and TV), but maybe at a lower resolution the problem didn't exist. I'll report back when I'm able to play with the TV's settings.
 

Bravo2zero

macrumors regular
Jun 1, 2013
125
42
Sheffield
getting same effect on tonight football, I'm seeing 1 ball in the middle and half a ball either side of it. I have 8k certified 2.1 HDMI cables , 370mb internet connection and a Samsung series 6 4k tv.
 

jent

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 31, 2010
899
659
getting same effect on tonight football, I'm seeing 1 ball in the middle and half a ball either side of it. I have 8k certified 2.1 HDMI cables , 370mb internet connection and a Samsung series 6 4k tv.
Based on the earlier comment about the TV's smoothing effects, I've noticed an improvement since going into my Samsung settings (I had to dig out my TV's remote since the Apple TV remote doesn't work for the TV's internal settings) and turning off a visual setting. I forget which specific one it was, but ironically I think it was one to reduce motion blur (even though it created a sort of blur and "artificating" when the image confused the algorithm). I'll report back if I notice anything additional.
 
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