This page is the reference for one setting, Settings → Playback, and for what the player does by itself when a picture stops: the exact numbers, the messages on screen, and the cases where the setting changes nothing.
The basics, in short
A live channel stutters when the player runs out of picture before the next piece arrives. The only defence is to hold more of it in hand, which costs distance: a bigger cushion is steadier and further behind live. Balanced is where the app starts; Stable is the one to try on weak Wi-Fi; Responsive is closest to live, for a cable. If Stable does not stop the stuttering, the buffer is not the problem.
The setting
Settings → Playback, three rows, one of them marked In use. Press Use on another. Takes effect on the next channel you open: a channel already playing keeps what it opened with.
| Setting | Behind live | Held ahead | Waits after a stall | What the app says under it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Responsive | about 6 s | 6 s | 1 s | Closest to live, smallest cushion. Best on a wired connection. |
| Balanced — the default | about 12 s | 10 s | 2 s | Two segments behind live. Leave it here unless something stutters. |
| Stable | about 20 s | up to 20 s on a live channel | 4 s | Furthest behind live, largest cushion. Best on weak Wi-Fi. |
Behind live is where a live channel starts and where back to live lands after you have paused or rewound. Held ahead is how much picture the player tries to keep in hand. Waits after a stall is how much it gathers, once the picture has run out, before playing again — a longer wait means fewer stops in a row.
The settings are the same in the Android TV app and in the phone and tablet app. The numbers are what the app asks for; they were chosen before anyone had measured them across many homes, and they will move when they have been.
What it changes
Live channels
How much is held ahead and, on channels that publish a live edge (HLS, an address ending .m3u8 — which includes the
live channels of an Xtream subscription), how far behind it to sit, as in the table. A live channel holds ahead
exactly as far as it sits behind live — 6, 12 or 20 seconds — since nothing further ahead than the edge exists yet.
The wait after a stall applies too. When a channel starts, the app waits the same short time (about a second) whatever the setting, so changing channel is not slower on Stable.
On a live channel of any kind, back to live lands at the setting’s distance: Stable returns you further from the edge, so the cushion is there when you arrive.
Films and series
The player holds as much of the film ahead as the device’s memory safely allows, whatever the setting: from about 150 to 250 megabytes on most devices, which at a 4K film’s rate is twenty to forty seconds, and minutes at an ordinary one. It keeps only a few seconds behind the picture, and reads only the audio language and subtitles in use.
What the setting changes is how much it gathers before the first picture — about 1, 2.5 or 5 seconds — and after a stall: about 2, 5 or 10 seconds. Stable starts a film a little later and, once it has had to stop, stops less often.
What the player does by itself
“Reconnecting 1 of 3”
The line on screen when a stream dropped on a network error and the app is opening it again by itself. It tries three times, waiting about 1, 3 and 8 seconds before each, and the line counts them: Reconnecting 1 of 3, 2 of 3, 3 of 3. Nothing to press. If the third does not work, the player stops and says whose fault it is — The stream stopped or This television is offline; the troubleshooting matrix has each of those screens.
Only a network fault is retried this way. A stream the device cannot decode, or an address that is not a stream, is not: trying again would reach the same screen.
A frozen picture that is still arriving
If the picture freezes but the film or channel is still arriving — a slow connection catching up, a jump into the middle of a large film — Lumen·TV waits for it. It reconnects only when nothing at all has arrived for about six seconds. A reconnection throws away what had been gathered and opens a new connection to the provider, which some subscriptions limited to one connection refuse for a moment, so it is kept for streams that have really stopped.
A film whose buffer keeps draining
Some providers cap each connection near the film’s own rate, so the buffer drains slowly through the busy scenes while everything is, strictly, still arriving. When the app sees the buffer draining like that and getting short, it closes the connection and opens a fresh one, which usually arrives faster for a while. It does this late on purpose, at least five minutes apart, and it stops trying after three fresh connections in a row that did not help. It never does it on a live channel.
Which one to choose
- The picture freezes briefly every few seconds on a live channel: try Stable.
- A film stops now and then: Stable makes each stop last a little longer and come less often.
- You want to be as close to live as possible, say for a match, and the television is on a cable: try Responsive.
- Anything else: Balanced.
When the buffer is not the problem
If Stable does not help, the cause is elsewhere: one channel down at the provider, a connection limit already in use, the network in the house, or the provider’s server at busy hours. The buffering checklist on the main site walks them in order. Two pages here go further: Your network for cable, Wi-Fi and VPN, and When a stream will not play for a channel that plays on another device and not on this one.
What there is not
So nobody looks for it: there is no field to type a buffer length in seconds, no separate buffer for timeshift (catch-up is not part of Lumen·TV at all), no manual choice of quality or bitrate — an HLS stream’s quality is chosen by the player as the connection allows — no resolution cap, and no on-screen statistics overlay.