Great question! I personally use a Shield and Apple TV in my living room, so I’m keen on expanding Dolby Vision support on Apple devices.
Currently, we support Profile 5 files by using AVPlayer (Apple’s native player) as the playback engine. It’s likely that we’ll do the same for Profile 8.1 files in tvOS 17 once we add support for it. Initially, this support may be limited to MP4 files, as we work on improving how we handle MKV content that currently requires direct streaming for AVPlayer support.
I don’t have much more to add here, other than I’m committed to improving overall playback on Apple TV, and we’re actively working to address issues, like the new audio engine, and stutter on the 2022 4K Apple TV.
