On a Mac, View ▸ Playback Stats, or ⌘I while something is playing, draws a panel over the picture describing what is actually happening. It is the quickest way to tell a file problem from a network one, and it is what to copy into a bug report.
Press ⌘I again to put it away.
The rows
| Route | How the file is reaching the player: sent as it is, remuxed on this device, or re-encoded by the server. |
| Source | Which server or drive it came from. |
| Video | The codec, the dimensions and the bitrate of the picture being drawn. |
| Audio | The track that is playing, and what it was converted from if it was converted. |
| Rendered as | What the device resolved that track to, which is not always what the track holds. A Dolby Atmos track on hardware that cannot present it says so here. |
| Dynamic range | Dolby Vision and its profile, HDR10, HDR10+ or HLG. |
| Subtitles | The track being drawn, or Off. |
| Buffer status | Whether the buffer is healthy or is being emptied faster than it fills. |
| Buffered ahead | How many seconds are already on the device, ahead of where you are. |
| Current download bitrate | How fast those seconds are arriving, in megabits per second. |
| AirPlay | Whether the picture is going to another screen. |
Reading it
The two pairs of rows are what make it useful.
Video and Audio against Rendered as. These are separate facts, and the interesting titles are the ones where they disagree. A file that says HEVC and renders as H.264 is being re-encoded on the way; a Dolby Atmos track rendered as 5.1 is a device that cannot present the object track.
Buffer status against Current download bitrate. These separate a network problem from everything else:
| Buffer healthy, picture stopping | Not bandwidth. Try the same title on another device to tell the file from the machine. |
| Buffer never gets ahead of you | Bandwidth. Set a quality ceiling in Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Quality so the server can send something smaller. |
| Download bitrate far above the file’s own | The server is re-encoding, and Route will say so. |
What to send in a report
If you are writing to us about a playback problem, the whole panel is the useful thing: it names the file, the route, the device’s own decisions and the state of the network in one place.