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Comment by qozoq | Hacker News Reader

VLC and other PC based software has always left me with just as many problems - if not more - regarding picture quality, as well as audio. The gold standard for me - this goes for three TVs going back 12 years - has always turned out to be to use the TV's own media player app, in conjunction with a solid DNLA server.

Otherwise it's gripes over finding the ideal combination of TV picture settings AND OS display settings. The TV is an OS of it's own, of course. How does one go about tweaking two sets of settings that overlap?

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I’ve tried various methods for playing media files on my TV over the years. I’ve settled on an AppleTV with the Infuse app as my gold standard.

I used to use Kodi, but got tired of endless minor issues and UI skins that haven’t evolved since 2005.

PCs have also been left behind when it comes to HDR, Dolby Vision, and streaming options due to DRM.

Thinking of going the nvidia shield route as Apple TV isn't able to play back overhead Atmos content. Infuse mixes the Atmos objects into a PCM stream but that has no overhead channels.

Correct. If you have an atmos setup then the AppleTV will convert TrueHD atmos and DTS:X to PCM. It will play back Dolby Digital Plus atmos however, from web rips etc.

It’s a shame because everything else about the AppleTV is such a nicer experience.

> AppleTV with the Infuse app

This. It even remembers played status across devices. No need to guess which episode to watch when on the phone in bed.

Similarly, I wrestled for years with getting good results out of Kodi/XBMC. It was mostly good but never entirely reliable and took a lot of fiddling to get to that stage. I recently switched to Jellyfin with the Android TV client app on my TV, and so far it’s been better results with almost zero fiddling.

I try to buy whichever is considered the best at the time and consider a TV to be a 2000Euro upwards purchase. But every TV needs the settings tweaked and a lot of its processing turned off. The quickest way to get there is to start with the tweaks others have done from video forums. Get to that to a reference point.

Then buy a good source like an Apple TV for streaming, a BluRay HD if you like disks or a OSMC Vero to run kodi. They should require very little changes or setup.

I think the audio is more challenging.

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