As Disney prepares to integrate its popular Disney+ streaming service with Hulu, numerous reports have emerged from users worldwide, complaining of persistent technical difficulties with features such as 4K, audio and HDR content.
While Disney+ is widely considered to be one of the world’s “big three” streaming applications, alongside Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, its reliability across multiple platforms has been called into question by a series of niggling issues.
For instance, Nvidia Shield users began complaining about problems with audio synchronisation with the app about three months ago. The problems occur when viewing content at 23.976Hz, which is the industry standard frame rate for movies and TV shows. Most reports claim that the problem can be solved by switching to a higher 60Hz frame rate, but Disney itself has not yet issued a proper fix.
There are further problems for Apple TV 4K users with the Disney+ app. According to FlatpanelsHD, some of the issues date back to 2024, but they have become much worse following an app update last month. Since that update, numerous users have complained on forums such as Reddit that 4K HDR streaming is now faulty, because the frame rate matching engine is broken. The result is endless juddery video that seriously impacts user’s enjoyment of movies and shows.
The German language website 4KFilme says the issue appears to be the result of a broken frame rate matching engine AND a problem with SDR, HDR and Dolby Vision matching. Because of this, whatever the user is watching can only be viewed in 1080p SDR, even though many have paid a premium subscription price to be able to watch content in HDR.
Disney recently issued another update in the shape of version 4.10.0, but the issue has not yet been fixed. Fortunately, some users have come up with a temporary workaround, by setting the Apple TV 4K to display content at 4K 24Hz Dolby Vision. For some reason, this seems to force Disney’s servers to deliver content in the correct format, but it can cause problems with other applications, so many users have to constantly fiddle with the settings when switching between apps.
Some Samsung TV owners have also reported that HDR is not working correctly when using Disney+. Others say the app is not delivering 4K content either, because Disney only delivers SDR content in 1080p. So far, no one has come up with a workaround for Samsung TVs.
For Amazon Fire TV device users, the problems are even worse. Many users say that the Disney+ app has been completely broken since August 20. Apparently, the app prompts them to install an update that does not exist. This prevents them from watching anything because the notification cannot be closed or ignored. Some Reddit posters say they have managed to fix it by uninstalling and then reinstalling the app, but others say that it just reappears once the app is reinstalled.
It’s not clear when Disney will be able to fix this growing list of issues, some of which are pretty serious, adding to user’s frustrations. However, they could be some time, given that Disney’s engineers are busy working on integrating the Disney+ app with Hulu, with the new unified app expected to launch sometime next year.
Disney has had problems like this before. As FlatpanelsHD recalls, thousands of Android TV users reported that 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos stopped working on the Disney+ app back in 2021, and had to wait several days before the issue was fixed. In fact, Dolby Atmos has been broken several times following application updates. And as mentioned, some Apple TV 4K users first started reporting problems with frame rate matching last year.
