Stuck on 720p

[Popeye13_Official]

BT SPORT on my FireTV stick seems to be topping out at 720p50 and won't go to 1080p50.

I'm not having this issue anywhere else on other services (Now, Netflix ect) which are all running 1080p50 and 2160p24 straight away. Any known issues, or fixes I can run?

(Stick is the latest FireTV 4K and set to match framerate with 2160p output enabled)

 

[DarrenDev · Accepted solution]

When we launched BT Sport on Fire TV, we found that some devices were maxing out CPU on the 1080p50 stream (even though they should be capable of supporting it), causing jittery picture. We therefore capped the HD stream to 720p50.
I'm not sure if that cap is still there - I've asked the team to check, and see if we can restrict the cap to just affected device models.

[Popeye13_Official]

Makes perfect sense and i appreciate your time in replying.

Hopefully at some point, the cap is released. I take it Ultimate isn't an option for FireTV at the moment?

[DarrenDev]

Ultimate is already available without cap (when the event is on Ultimate) - it's only the HD streams that are affected.

[j154822]

I know this is an older thread, but I wanted to chime in on this, this issue is not just effecting fire TV sticks it's also effecting the fire TV cube 2nd like the OP I am also capped at 720/50 despite the fact that the box i more than capable of streaming at 4k 60. The cube itself is able to play btsports ultimate UHD perfectly at 60fps which makes it even more ridiculous that you're saying that the firetv device can have to be capped at 720/50 due to the CPU, please fix this  as soon as possible thanks I certainly would not say that this issue is solved

[Brucemeister5]

Indeed. I’ve got the Fire Stick 4K and BT Sport Ultimate does look beautiful on that. I have mine set at 50fps though which looks better than 60fps. From my side of the counter I’m also bound to say that I also watch Sky Sports via the Now app on there and they’ve got it running at 1080/50 with the Boost and it really does look excellent. 

[DarrenDev]

I would definitely recommend leaving your device configured with resolution: automatic. This allows the app to decide what resolution and refresh rate to use based on the content - e.g. forcing it to 60Hz will cause BT Sport (with it's 25/50fps content) to jump a lot. With it set to automatic, the app will switch to the highest supported resolution that supports 50fps.

As for removing the 720p cap on Amazon devices - this will come in our next app update, coming very soon.

[Brucemeister5]

I’m now getting the BT Sport channels on my Fire tv Stick 4K  with 1080p @ 50fps. Thanks guys.

[Brucemeister5]

I have to make an observation on this since it was changed to 1080p/50fps. The best picture quality on the BT Sport channels is now undoubtedly obtained by setting the display to 1080p 50 hz  rather than automatic. The same is also true on the Sky Sports channels which have been available at this resolution for much longer. The picture is not entirely smooth by setting it to automatic. This is my opinion on my Fire TV stick 4K. I would change the setting to automatic if I was going to watch something on BT Sport Ultimate rather then just HD. 

[DarrenDev]

An interesting observation @Brucemeister5 - that suggests that your device is struggling with the upscaling to 4k, but it really shouldn't.

The only alternative we have is to auto switch resolution each time a video is started (switching to 720p25/1080p50/2160p50 depending on the content), but this causes black screens on most TVs which is a poor experience. Thus we switch to the highest to cater for all content.