Apple TV 4K and Vanishing Audio

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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JohnJ9
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Apr 12, 2012 1:29 am

Apple TV 4K and Vanishing Audio

Post by JohnJ9 »

I am a long time user of MakeMKV and HandBrake, all for my own purchased video content, and just making it easy to watch my library on my Apple TV 4K.

I do NOT believe what I'm about to describe is a problem with HandBrake. However, I just thought maybe the community here would have some ideas on this, because I'm more than a bit baffled.

Starting a few weeks ago, likely with the last TVOs update the beginning of June, my movies picked up a strange behavior: they play fine for the first five to six minutes, but then the video continues while the audio drops away. No amount of finagling seemed to cure the problem, short of restarting the ATV, returning to the movie, resuming it - at which point it will play maybe 15-20 seconds of video with audio, but then the audio drops again.

I don't watch a lot of movies, mostly TV series I've also run through MakeMKV and HandBrake. The first time this happened to me, I suspected somehow my mp4 file had somehow gotten damaged - this made no sense, but I was really searching for answers. A few nights later, the same thing happened on another movie - an old B&W movie that I'd pulled off a purchased BluRay disc. This time, I started investigating a bit more, found I could not get the movie to restart with audio for more than 15 or so seconds, and gave up. What was odd was that, following the failure and the giving up, I switched over to watching a converted TV show - the audio worked perfectly immediately, and never had a problem!

This pattern has persisted. I do suspect this is an Apple problem in TVOs, but I'm sure it's the sort of thing you could never convince them of.

Is anyone else experiencing something like this?

All my stuff is largely converted the same way, and I'd not changed any settings. I feel the fact the TV shows continue to work show that the problem is somewhere else, plus the fact it's multiple movies that fail, and no TV shows that fail. The only thing I can suspect at this point is that I convert the movies at RF 18 instead of 19, and wonder whether more data is now overwhelming the hockey puck - clearly, I'm grasping for answers here!

Just wondering if others are experiencing similar issues with their converted content.
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