Transcoding based on IP address

[herbi3]

Describe the feature request

some older Apple TVs (HD version mostly) have issues with live streams. this seems mostly a tvOS17 issue, however with transcoding enabled, it seems to function more reliably for the ATV. I don't want to have transcoding always enabled for everything, only the devices I know struggle with the direct live stream.

Describe the proposed solution

transcoding option for specific ip addresses.

Describe alternatives you have considered to the enhancement

ultimately, live streams are an issue since tvOS17. hardly reliable at all now days so this is really an apple issue. apple is extremely slow to fix anything tvOS related, and even more so for HomeKit things. best way I believe, is via this plugin to lower the 'load' on the older devices

[hjdhjd]

This feature existed once-upon-a-time and I ultimately disabled it because HomeKit can be unreliable about deciding when to stream directly, even in home networks, versus when to run it through a HomeKit hub. I might revisit this in the future, but it's unlikely anytime soon.

A couple of other things to note:

• No, it's not a tvOS 17 issue - it's existed since tvOS 14 at least, and continues to this day. Certain versions are better than others, but all tvOS versions exhibit issues with a sufficient number of cameras, and the issue isn't HBUP-specific...they occur with MFI-certified HomeKit cameras as well.
• My advice is to embrace transcoding and set a high quality threshold at home, if desired. The most recent HBUP release (v6.22.0) allows you to do so and tune this for high-latency connections (e.g. cellular/mobile) and local scenarios. You can achieve the functional equivalence you're looking for, for the most part. See the video feature options section in the HBUP webUI for the settings.

Remember that UniFi cameras like the AI/G4 Pro can produce 16,000 kbps...versus the no-more-than 1,000 kbps under ideal conditions that HomeKit ever requests. You really don't want to send (in my case) 20+ cameras streaming that much data at an Apple TV simultaneously, which you can do if you choose some of the multicam views available on tvOS.

Setting a higher-quality transcoding threshold, especially if you're on a device that has hardware transcoding (and therefore even less latency), is the better route.

Give it a go and welcome your feedback!

[herbi3]

@hjdhjd it seems 90% of the time for an ATV4 HD with tvos17 live streams don't work. Where as in tvOS16, it never skipped a beat. This is common accross x5 of our ATV4 HD devices.

However, the other three ATV4K devices will work somewhat better, around 30% of the time the stream will fail now in tvos17. Again, across all x8 devices with the previous tvos16, this was never an issue.

The issue is we don't want transcoding for all devices. It adds an additional delay for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and 4K Apple TVs. It's simply just the HD Apple TVs where we need transcoding with a lower quality set.

With 8 months since tvOS17 being released, we know Apple won't be fixing this any time soon (feedback sent, and as usual, no response or improvements released)

Even worse now is, when streaming remotely the stream will fail if HomeKit has wrongly selected a lower capable device (HD atv4) this means ALL remote streams fail. This happens when we are remotely connected but using wifi (I.e using the wifi at work, it doesn't recognise it as a high latency device) so the high latency transcoding doesn't work unless we are connected via cellular instead.

Now Apple have removed the ability to exclude any device as a home hub, this is now out of our control and severely reduces the user experience, unless we can add this feature back in..

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