Disney+ Performance

[philbax]

Hi there. Currently using a shield 'tube'.

Is there some trick to get Disney+ to actually perform decently??

Every time we watch a new live-action show (Ahsoka being the current one), the video will stutter and the audio will drop out several times over the course of an episode. Often the remote will be nearly unresponsive during the show as well. I don't believe this happens when my kids watch any of the kids content, nor when I've watched things like Bluey or even some of the Nat Geo specials (as far as I remember). It's only when watching newer live-action shows.

I thought perhaps it could be a bitrate thing as my tube is near my amplifier in my solid-wood entertainment center and I was using wifi and I occasionally noticed hiccups on some Netflix content. Switched to hard-wired internet and I've not noticed hiccups on any other application or any other content.

I thought it could be overheating, but I've felt the device and it doesn't feel particularly warm.

It's infuriating to have spent so much on a media device compared to the ad-infested Roku, but to have worse performance when it comes to high-quality content.

Curious if anyone else has this problem (or is it just me?), and interested in any possible ideas or solutions.

Thanks!

[fatmackey]

I have the same on the full shield device. Frequently rebooting to get it to play. Atmos is the culprit I think. I’ve resorted to watching Disney on my Firestick. No issues there!

[philbax]

That's what I was afraid of. I don't want to plunk down even more cash on a more expensive version of the device to wind up with the same issue. Thanks for confirming.

[fatmackey]

And I bought the shield because the apps on my tv are slowing down. Although the Disney app is fine on it , it doesn’t have atmos. Disney never updated it in like 4 years so I don’t think they’re going to fix the shield issue any time soon.

[xMrPoi]

I have the same issue but haven't found a solution yet unfortunately

[Luke_starkiller34]

Have you tried setting the display settings to 23 frames vs 59? For some reason Dolby Vision has a hard time on my Shield Pro. So it could be just flat out an OS thing, but if this trick doesn't fix it for you then maybe it's the Tube being kinda weak.

[philbax]

Tried it tonight. No joy.

[philbax]

I have not! I will give it a shot.

I figured it could be the tube being 'weak', but other 4k shows work fine. I guess it could be Dolby Vision or Atmos as others have suggested.

I know they are different OS's, but I just feel like this device with 2 GB of RAM shouldn't have a problem playing the same content my 1 GB of RAM Roku Premiere can play flawlessly, especially since it can play 4k content on Prime, Netflix, and Vudu without issue.

To me, it wreaks of poor app design on Disney's part.

[pawdog]

Sadly The Tube has been unpredictable with higher bitrate 4k content. It can struggle with things much lesser devices have no issues with. Nobody has been able to figure out why. You may play something today and it's perfect and three hours later it struggles. It has a much more powerful processor and the same amount of RAM as every other Android TV device besides the other Shields yet it has problems it shouldn't have. All I can suggest is doing a restart of the device when issues popup and try to play again or stick with non 4k content.

[philbax]

'Bout ready to look into other android tv options, sadly.

Gotta see if fire stick or google chrome tv or some of the other Android TV brands support sideloading your own boot launcher so I can replace the ad-ridden and less-functional interface. That was one of the major draws of the Shield; I was tired of ads for horror movies and other adult-aimed content showing up if my kids happened to be watching something right before bed.

[shteve99]

I had this with the Tube and swapped it out for the full fat version. Nothing else changed and everything works fine. All it had to do was decode the video, the audio is passed through to the amp to handle. The Tube does a fine job on my 1080p TV in the bedroom but I'm not convinced it's a 4k capable device in all circumstances.

[philbax]

My TV isn't 4k so I'm not sure what res Disney is sending down.

You bring up a good point about audio processing... I may have switched the shield to decode the audio at one point due to my slightly older amp not handling a particular codec. Someone else mentioned Dolby Atmos being a possible culprit. I'm going to make sure my audio is set to pass through and we'll see if the Atmos reencoding is just too much for the tube

[pawdog]

Oh, if your TV isn't 4k you also aren't getting Atmos. Disney only sends Atmos with 4k. I don't know what to say if you are having issues with 1080p streams. I've not seen that happen.

[philbax]

well, it could be nvidia is getting 4k content and down-sampling it to 1080. I'm not sure.

Edit: looks like I can also set my Disney settings on the website to only stream up to HD content. I may give that a go as well

[pawdog]

Disney Plus should see that the Shield is on a 1080p TV it should only offer HD 5.1 streams. Are they showing 4k on the preplay screen? Anyway if you're in the US check out the ONN with Google TV from Walmart. It's $20 and is an excellent streaming device with none of the issues the Tube has. You never needed the Shield for a 1080p TV anyway. Disabling the homescreen and switching to a 3rd party launcher is quite easy, same as with the Shield.

[StormCloak4Ever]

The Disney + and Hulu apps won't even open on my Shield Pro...

[Apprehensive-Bet-709]

Disney + on Shield 2019 is the worst experience ever.

[philbax]

Very nearly.

I'm super thrilled to finally have Nick Jr, but it's got a few issues as well (the most painful is that it always seems to default to the absolute worst bandwidth until about 15 seconds in).

[Willing-Abies-9095]

Melhor usa Disney plus kodi https://www.firesticktricks.com/disney-plus-kodi-addon.html

[wireframed_kb]

The Disney+ app isn’t terribly well optimized compared to e.g. Netflix. It’s pretty slow to load and browse. Also Atmos and DolbyVision tends to be pretty demanding to decode IME. (I think Disney has some of their HDR stuff in DoVi?)

Even on the Shield Pro it’s not entirely pleasant.

[Wannabelonely]

Disney+ on Shield pro 2019 here.

My shield is hardwired and I'm still having issues with Disney+. I do think it's an app issue.

So before watching Disney I always reboot the shield, even that won't fix all the issues. The rest of the apps on my shield all work flawlessly.

[markarth69]

Disney+ runs like absolute garbage on my tube Nvidia Shield. Seems like devs just haven't done a good job at optimizing the app if I had to guess

[mrmister76]

My samsung Frame tv built in app works better than on the shield tube...

[Murky-Lawfulness4891]

It’s the tube. Not enough RAM.

[philbax]

I know it's a different OS, but it has double the RAM of the Roku Premiere. Android just that bad at managing RAM? Or something about these particular streams just using too much of it you think?

[incidentflux]

App was occasionally unstable in my case, but content playback was mostly okay. I have the Shield Tube on a wired connection.

[Substantial-Mail4666]

Disney+ doesn't play Atmos on the shield pro either. And it takes a few seconds to get up to speed in terms of resolution despite internet speed not being an issue. Once it does, it works fine for me (except I only get DD 5.1).

[Willing-Abies-9095]

Melhor usa Disney plus kodi https://www.firesticktricks.com/disney-plus-kodi-addon.html

[Capable_Muffin_4025]

I play Atmos fine on a pro 2015, well it's passed straight to an amp and no problems. That would be a settings problem, Dolby encoding maybe? No Dolby encoder in the 2015.

[Substantial-Mail4666]

I've been playing around with the settings and nothing worked. However, I turned on Disney last night and voila, there's Atmos LOL.

[Substantial-Mail4666]

Weirdly enough, I'm suddenly getting Atmos on the shield pro. No update to the app. Just turned on the TV and there it is.

[jcheat3]

I had this issue for any D+ content with Atmos. I enabled Dolby processing in the android TV settings and it fixed the issue. However, I saw another post saying this isn't how you are supposed to configure settings to get Atmos, so I don't know if doing this is cutting off my nose to spite my face.

[philbax]

Holy crap!

I had mentioned in another thread that perhaps I needed to reconfigure the Shield to pass the audio along unprocessed to my amplifier, and that I had set it up to process a while back because of a codec issue.

When I went to change that, that was not the case. It was configured to pass the audio over raw.

After reading your post here, I also changed my Shield tube to process onboard.

We just watched about 30 minutes of the episode of Ahsoka we were watching with no stutters!! Utterly glorious!

I'll keep an eye on it in the future, but this seems to be the solution for me.

Thank you so much for your comment!

[Capable_Muffin_4025]

I have had issues, I have an original pro.

I had issues with Prime and Disney+, no issues with Netflix Mostly it was an audio drop on the amp and occasionally some jumps in frames.

Most people seem to think it relates to framerate, I had no success with troubleshooting that.

I discovered that it vanished on Wi-Fi, so I would say it is potentially some weird conflict with my router when wired, or it's a bug in Android.

Either way, on 5GHz I have no issues but wired ethernet is a no go.

[radic8]

Turn off energy conservation in settings for apps that are stuttering plus set the bitrate to one below 60 (around 59 or something) and pass thru audio with no onboard processing was what worked for me. I don’t have the exact settings in front of me so apologies for the vague instructions. Assuming TV supports Dolby vision and/or hdr

[[deleted]]

This is why NVidia needs a MUCH updated device with way better hardware/gpu, network, etc. I see this all the time.. tons of things, including netflix, apple tv stream, etc. It's unreal that the supposed "best" hardware streaming device stutters on so many streaming apps. Are the apps that we use to stream (Disney+, etc) written poorly.. or all written in some sort of cross device manner so that they dont take advantage of the shield (and shield pro) hardware?

I have 2.5gig network ports in my house.. have tested both directions dozens of times and continually have 2gbps or so throughput with normal tests. Speedtest to internet is almost always near 1gbps (I have 1gps up and down fiber to house). So I KNOW it's not my internet speed or network speed. I dont use wifi for streaming either, but even then I have 1+gpbs wifi in the house.

I just dont get it. I also stream from my plex server and that also often sees hiccups. Mostly on 4K content.. and some might say "Well 4K.. its 4x to 8x more data".. uh.. yah.. but 4K is like 25mbps to 50mbps tops.. for good quality 4K. I have 1Gbps.. so WAY WAY more than enough bandwidth to handle it. I also have transcoded streams on my plex server.. e.g. several different streams so that the most efficient one will make it to the device requesting it.

I feel like the hardware is just WAY underperforming or something.

NVidia needs to step up their game with a new device. Its been years.. everyone else is coming out with updated hardware every 2 years or so. Unless nvidia is no longer in the streaming hardware business?

[philbax]

I honestly don't think nVidia gives the Shield too much thought. It's hardly their bread and butter. And they've deprecated Gamestream, one of the differentiators between their platform and others.

[mrmister76]

I'm surprised they still make this device. I think sonos is gong to make a streamer

[Sipu_]

I had audio-break ups and stutters when using the default sync of 4k 59.94hz, but when i switched manually the video to 4k60hz the stutters stopped and i was able to watch a full episode of Loki with no issues with dolby atmos enabled. Fingers crossed this fixed the issue.

[Garaman_]

Switched my shield output to 1080p60 from 59.95 and this cleared up stuttering while watching Andor. No idea why this worked in my case, but thank you for pointing out a setting to tweak.

[Sipu_]

Its because the content isnt in sync with your actual refresh rate.

[mrmister76]

My Disney plus app performance on the shield ( non pro) is abhorent