Stuck on 720p

[Brucemeister5]

I’m very happy with it though. I have no problems watching BT Sport Ultimate when I need it. I just make sure I’m on automatic. In my opinion the best PQ for HD is obtained by using 1080p 50hz. The same has been the case with Sky Sports on the same device. The PQ looks crisper and brighter in both cases. My BT Sport Ultimate is also excellent.

[Brucemeister5]

I only seem to be getting c35-38fps on my Fire tv 4K stick on the BT Sport channels  at the moment. I first noticed it on the live cricket last night, and it’s still the same this morning. I’ve got a full house of green ticks on my device checker and also tried altering the display settings. 

[DarrenDev]

BT Sport is broadcast in 25fps at lower quality and 50fps at the higher bitrates. What are you using to measure frame rate?

[Brucemeister5]

My remote control to get into the developer menu as I was instructed on the trial last summer.

[DarrenDev]

Ok. I can only assume your bandwidth is on the cusp of 50fps, so it's switching up and down, causing a strange average.

[Brucemeister5]

Ok, I don’t pretend to understand how these things work, but I’m still getting 50fps on the Sky Sports channels which are now all @ 50fps since 15th July. I can only assume that the BT Sport live channels have a different configuration on the Fire TV stick.

[Brucemeister5]

I’ve just reverted to my NOW(tv) stick and the BT Sport channels all look superb on there. This is obviously an issue which is specific to the Fire TV stick. I don’t know when the next live sport is due to be on BT Sport Ultimate, but I’ll need to see what happens then.

[DarrenDev]

@Brucemeister5 send me a DM with your BT ID and I'll check the stats

[DarrenDev]

OK, so an update on this one: it's driving me crazy!

I've been trying different options all afternoon, however the Amazon Fire Stick 4K 1st gen that I have has proven that it's just not capable of suitably playing our regular (non-Ultimate) content at 1080p50.

The secure AVC decoder on the device cannot keep up, and drops a LOT frames.  Forcing it to use either the insecure AVC decoder or the Google software decoder fixes the issue with dropped frames, but then lip sync becomes really bad.

I've got a few more things to try, but as things stand we may end up needing to re-introduce the 720p50 cap for this model on the regular channels.  We'll then need to test all other models to see which of them also suffer.

[Brucemeister5]

Thanks for your efforts on this @DarrenDev . As long as I can still access Ultimate on this device I’ll be happy. I have alternative devices to view the regular  channels. Strangely I hadn’t had any issues with it since 1080p/50 was introduced a few weeks ago until a couple of nights ago.