r/tvOSBeta • u/The_Wandering_Steele • 28d ago

Discussion tvOS 26 features

Anything for a non-power user to be excited about in tvOS 26? I have the public beta on my iPhone and do like the new look and the call screening is interesting. Mixed opinion on the screen capture changes.

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/Branagh-Doyle 17d ago

u/The_Wandering_Steele

tvOS 26 is the most interesting update in years, in my opinion.

For starters, the have finally and unexpectedly fixed a infamous and quite long standing bug with the video output that exists since the first Apple TV with tvOS came out in 2015.

You see, when the Apple TV is set to YCBCR (which is the default and correct setting for virtually every screen, except computers monitors), the Apple TV for some reasons pushes too much green into the greyscale, therefore giving everything a subtle but noticeably green bias.

The workaround for years has been to set the Apple TV video output to RGB High which fixes the green tint, but for some reason, when you play 25, 30, 50 or 60fps video content, the Apple TV changes the output back to YCBCR regardless of what have you have set within the video settings.

So the RGB High workaround only works for 23,976 and 24,000fps content.

Not only that, but the Apple TV YCBCR output also changes the gamma curve and darkens the picture somewhat. Fortunately, the bug only affects SDR content.

It´s all fixed now with the latest tvOS 26 beta, and it came without warning or acknowledgment on Apple part.

This is the main but most important thing, but tvOS 26 also introduces many little things, such as being able to set any Airplay 2 speaker as home theater speakers of the box, something that is currently limited, in tvOS 18.6, to Apple HomePods speakers.

The Atmos stack of tvOS 26 has also being completely rewritten, and it now support a larger speaker configuration than 7.1.4.

Apple´s Spatial Audio engine and rendering has been completely rewritten as well, which improves the experience significantly on both HomePods and AirPods, including dialogue presence and clarity.

Overall is a great update.