Here at Cult of Mac, we love Apple’s new A4-powered update to their “hobbyist” set-top box, the AppleTV… but all is not rosy for everyone. According to reports coming in from users, the new AppleTV might be prone to a very, very subtle skipping problem that — once seen — becomes impossible to unsee.
Here’s what is going on. When streaming video, the AppleTV occasionally jumps a frame. What happens is that the motion will completely stop for a single frame, then will skip the next frame to catch up.
It seems like it might be a decoding problem. According to reports, the problem is most apparent when there is a lot of action and motion in a scene.
There are a fair number of discussions about this issue on Apple’s own support forums so it seems pretty likely that Apple will get around to fixing the issue in due time. Still, if these are the sorts of problems the new AppleTV has decoding 720p video, perhaps it’s best that it doesn’t try to tackle the more system-intensive 1080p resolution.
