General Discussion From HBO Max to Max Official Thread! (1 Viewer)

[ManW_TheUncool]

What display is he using, projector, LED or OLED? Is he setting his ATV manually? I just did so myself and the results are still negative in regard to playing back 4K/Dolby Vision.

IIRC, @JohnRice has a Visio (and/or Hisense) something LED... unless he recently sprung for an LG OLED while I was paying attention...

Hmmm... John, didn't you used to list your A/V gear in your HTF signature and/or profile?

_Man_

 

[JohnRice]

IIRC, @JohnRice has a Visio (and/or Hisense) something LED... unless he recently sprung for an LG OLED while I was paying attention...

_Man_

What I tested it on was the Vizio M Series in the living room. Since "Match Range" doesn't work, if I set video output to 4K DV, on the Max app everything plays in DV, even when the source isn't DV. That's fine with DV sources, but sources which aren't DV have this harsh, over saturated fake DV.

 

[JohnRice]

Hmmm... John, didn't you used to list your A/V gear in your HTF signature and/or profile?

_Man_

I actually removed that from my signature a long time ago. For various reasons.

 

[Robert Crawford]

What I tested it on was the Vizio M Series in the living room. Since "Match Range" doesn't work, if I set video output to 4K DV, on the Max app everything plays in DV, even when the source isn't DV. That's fine with DV sources, but sources which aren't DV have this harsh, over saturated fake DV.

Are you using your ATV unit? I can get 4K/Dolby Vision using the Max app on my LG OLED. However, I can't get 4K/Dolby Vision using the Max app through my ATV4K device.

 

[Robert Crawford]

I've stopped using the ATV app until they issue a new one. I did something similar when they mucked up a previous release. Fortunately for me my two LG TVs have a Max app that functions correctly in terms of DV/HDR anyway. Although the first two movies I watched with the LG app I saw a black frame issue maybe 6-7 times during a 2 hour movie. But that's the lesser of the evils.

Yeah, I tried the Max app on one of my LG OLEDs and it worked fine in 4K/Dolby Vision. However, using the Max app on my ATV4K device, it still won't play any 4K/Dolby Vision programming.

 

[JohnRice]

Are you using your ATV unit? I can get 4K/Dolby Vision using the Max app on my LG OLED. However, I can't get 4K/Dolby Vision using the Max app through my ATV4K device.

This using the Max app on a AppleTV 4K gen 2. If I set the video output to 4K DV on the ATV’s video output, all output from the Max app is in DV, even when the source is NOT DV. Enabling “Match Range” in the ATV’s video output does not make it work right, since the Max app appears to ignore that setting.

My suspicious side wonders if this is intentional, since they now have a new, more expensive 4K subscription level. They can say they’ve grandfathered in current subscribers, but it’s almost impossible to get what we got a few days ago.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

My suspicious side wonders if this is intentional, since they now have a new, more expensive 4K subscription level. They can say they’ve grandfathered in current subscribers, but it’s almost impossible to get what we got a few days ago.

That doesn't seem likely since they still have more non-HDR content than HDR, which makes this a problem for anyone who wants 4K/HDR... and that will probably always be the case (well, for a very long time anyhow )...

Also, they broke the frame rate match too, not just DR match... although that's probably less noticeable for most customers w/ capable displays...

_Man_

 

[Robert Saccone]

Has there been any acknowledgement from them about the issues on Apple TV yet?

 

[Robert Crawford]

Has there been any acknowledgement from them about the issues on Apple TV yet?

Nope!

 

[Carlo_M]

Every time an app maker tries to move away from the native player, it always mucks things up. I don't know why they choose to do it, unless Apple takes an additional chunk of revenue if you use their native player (I have no idea if they do this or not). But if they don't, really there's no excuse not to use their native player as they seem to know what they're doing in their own ecosystem.

 

[JohnRice]

Every streaming service has their own app on the AppleTV. HBO always developed their own app. It just changed names, so I have no idea what you’re referring to by “native player”. Apple’s apps only work to access Apple’s streaming services.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Every streaming service has their own app on the AppleTV. HBO always developed their own app. It just changed names, so I have no idea what you’re referring to by “native player”. Apple’s apps only work to access Apple’s streaming services.

He's talking about the actual video player part of each app, which can (or should probably) be its own modular object that can be (more or less) easily interchangeable (w/ the rest of the app UI largely wrapped around it) w/ fairly minimal changes (like perhaps just some portability adjustments and corresponding rebuild), if done right.

Kinda like engines (or maybe more like transmission type or tires or the like) in a car to some extent. OR actually, probably more like how you can have different app/filter/effects plug-ins (that really function as their own programs w/in the larger program) some of which do the same kinds of things (like denoise, RAW conversion, etc) w/in Photoshop, Premiere Pro, et al... although I guess they'd never want such interchangeability to be directly accessible/applicable by end-users (that is, if their seemingly awful software designers and/or coders and QA can even manage such at all), hehheh...

Actually, I haven't really paid enough attention to how Windoze video players (nor Mac since I'm not a Mac guy) handle things, but there are probably already some variation of that in Windoze for video apps.

_Man_

 

[Carlo_M]

iOS, tvOS, etc. has its own native player built into the OS which devs can either use within their app, or choose to build their own video player. The problem with building your own, is that you better have good programmers to make sure it takes advantage of all the features that the native tvOS player has (or exceeds it). So far, those who have tried to create their own player functionality within their app have had subpar results.

Here's the relevant passage from: https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/23/hbo-max-app-tvos-apple-tv/

As outlined by friend-of-the-site Sigmund Judge on Twitter, the new Max app for Apple TV switches away from Apple’s native video player. Instead, the app uses a custom video player that’s inconsistent with the rest of the Apple TV experience.

Click on Sigmund Judge's Twitter link to get the sordid history lol.

 

[Carlo_M]

More from that article:

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same exact thing happened with the HBO Max app back in 2021. The HBO Max app for Apple TV was updated to use a custom video player, replacing the native tvOS video player. After blowback from customers, HBO reverted this decision and rolled back to the native tvOS video player.

Real life example of "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

There could be real, good reasons to develop and use your own video player though... as Apple's native player is/was probably not perfect or cover all the basis some platforms and/or app providers (and maybe their customers) might want/need.

To go back to my example above, there can be very real reasons to want some other denoise or RAW conversion plug-in than the one Adobe provides for their software for instance. The base one Adobe provides may be perfectly good/fine for most users, most of the time, but there could be better at least for some cases.

Kinda like there are different kinds of tires you might want/need for your car for instance.

But yeah, in this case, end-users wouldn't be the one (able to be) choosing... or most of us would get rid of what Amazon does w/ theirs for instance (not that the player itself is the only problem w/ their app/platform/service), LOL...

_Man_

 

[jayembee]

Real life example of "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Even more appropriate quote:

"We're not repeating history...just the parts that sucked." (Laszlo Cravensworth, What We Do in the Shadows)

 

[Carlo_M]

Look, if you can do better than Apple's native player, do it. But there's nothing about HBO's...er sorry...Max's 2021 or 2023 attempts that did anything to improve the picture or sound quality (in fact it broke DV/HDR functionality) and omitted a bunch of other native features that are outlined in that article and Twitter post. They've literally made the same mistake...twice.

If you're going to build a better mousetrap, do it. But all Max is doing is getting their own fingers snapped off in that trap they're trying to build.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Anyhoo, I just got a request from the Max iOS app (yes, on my phone... while I was checking something) to answer a very brief, couple-question, review-like questionnaire, and I went ahead and complained to them about loss of general UI refinements (vs the old app) plus most importantly, the Match DR and frame rate issue (and pointed out this impacts 4K content, which they should care about)...

There's not enough space for more detailed commenting in that questionnaire, so I didn't go into the other specifics. I probably shoulda tried to include a link to an article that summarizes everything well.

Anyway, I imagine everyone should probably respond to such questionnaires accordingly since they're clearly asking upon use of their app(s)...

_Man_

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Look, if you can do better than Apple's native player, do it. But there's nothing about HBO's...er sorry...Max's 2021 or 2023 attempts that did anything to improve the picture or sound quality (in fact it broke DV/HDR functionality) and omitted a bunch of other native features that are outlined in that article and Twitter post. They've literally made the same mistake...twice.

If you're going to build a better mousetrap, do it. But all Max is doing is getting their own fingers snapped off in that trap they're trying to build.

I suspect it's probably not just as simple as doing "better" per se (at least from the development/coding side of this vs all aspects of end-user experience).

Remember, they're also creating this stuff to run on multiple OS/hardware platforms/devices. I don't have the details, but they could find it easier for themselves to use their own video player that can yield more consistent results across platforms/devices that may not happen w/ native players. For instance, presumably, Amazon wants to keep their X-Ray UI that may need to be tightly coupled to the video player, which may not be doable w/ (at least some) native players, no matter how much many of us actually dislike their X-Ray UI.

They probably most likely want a (very) high degree of uniformity across all OS/hardware platforms, including web browsers (on Windoze PCs and MacOS), if possible, which does seem to be so...

No idea why Warner/HBO's choosing this route, but in their case, they may well revert to using the native player (as they had w/ the old app).

_Man_

 

[Carlo_M]

While I'm not a fan of Prime's player either, at least with their X-Ray they're showing you what they're trying to do.

As far as I can see, there's no value add to HBO's player. Only subtractions, omissions and glitches. And with regards to creating stuff to run across platforms, what could be easier than just using the player that comes with the OS and spare yourself the extra programming?

I don't like Prime's native player (it also glitches or doesn't show some programming in DV/Atmos in the ATV versions that it does in LG OS's Prime App), but at least with X-Ray I can see what they're trying to do even if I don't agree it's worth the tradeoff.

Max player is all negatives with no upside. Which they did before. And didn't learn from.