The setting for enabling the new audio player is gone in this build for some reason, so I can’t test if there’s any improvement in AirPlay 2 support with the new engine.
My Apple TV (1st gen 4K) has a fan, so I haven’t been able to tell if there’s a difference in video playback performance. I need to be in a really silent room to hear the fan kick in (which it did on occasion in the past with extremely high bitrate videos). The new thermal state parameter did change from ‘nominal’ to ‘fair’ to ‘serious’ after several minutes of playback with the couple of 4K Dolby Vision remuxes I’ve tried. I’ve also noticed some (< 40) dropped frames when it got hotter with one of the files, but not with the others.
Speaking of Dolby Vision support, it’s really lacking on this device. I noticed that the huge thread about it had been (automatically) closed because of inactivity, but nothing has really changed: P7 and P8 videos still play in fake DV (why?), and P5 videos make the player switch to the native AVPlayer and sometimes work, but with many files the app just shows the spinning wheel animation instead.
I mean, it’s good to have these performance upgrades, but how valuable are they if I have to switch to another app to play these videos with proper tone mapping anyway? I guess it would be good for standard HDR10 had Apple TV not had this little-known problem with incorrectly reporting HDR metadata that makes it ill-suited for HDR10 videos in general (and nothing can be done about it unless Apple fixes it). There’s also the less popular HDR10+ format that’s not supported either.
Anyway, I hope modern formats get properly supported on Apple TV someday to go along with these performance improvements; they’re quite ubiquitous now and are probably the main source of all the thermal throttling and video stuttering issues addressed by this update.
