Your TV is adding motion smoothing to everything, and switching it off isn't the whole fix

Published Sep 14, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming hardware, she's covered just about everything. Whether it's breaking news about the latest AMD NPUs or creating video tutorials on social media platforms, Jasmine has contributed to the world of AI and tech in a variety of ways including interviewing the CEO of Razer, AMD's Director of Product Marketing and the VP of Lenovo. Passionate about gaming and PC technology, she has built countless computers, keyboards and other peripherals - knowing them inside and out. For a long time, Hollywood waged a crusade against motion smoothing, with directors and actors begging consumers to dig into their TV settings and kill Auto Motion, Auto Motion Plus, or Motion Flow to eradicate the sickening hyperreal soap opera effect. Even if you toggle motion smoothing off on your high-end OLED TV, you might still see wide panning shots across landscapes or city skylines look agonizingly harsh, with choppy, jarring, flickering that feels like an aggressive strobe light. It feels worse than the soap opera effect you just killed. Turning off motion smoothing only solves half the problem. Modern OLED panels have near-instantaneous pixel response times, which turn the natural 24fps film cadence into aggressive motion stutter. To get genuine cinematic motion without the soap effect, you have to understand the physical difference between judder and stutter. Understanding stutter vs judder You need to know the difference Stutter and judder are different. Modern TVs don't flicker like old CRT tubes or 35mm film projectors with spinning shutters. They're sample-and-hold displays. This means an image frame is held completely static and illuminated on screen until the next refresh cycle draws the next frame. Vintage LCDs essentially hide 24p judder because of slow pixel response. Older LCD TVs have slow pixel response times of 10ms to 30ms, which means pixels physically took time to transition from gray to gray, creating natural hardware-level motion blur that smoothed the visual jump between 24 fps frames. With OLED, you get sub-millisecond response time, which can lead to severe stutter. OLED pixels transition states at under 0.1ms. At 24fps each frame stays frozen on screen for roughly 41.4ms, completely razor-sharp, before instantly teleporting to the next frame position. Your eye tracks the motion smoothly across the screen, but the image holds still and then leaps. The result is stutter: a perceived stroboscopic slideshow during slow pans. Judder is something different entirely and is instead a mathematical timing error. When a 24fps film is broadcast over a standard 60 Hz video signal, like with cable boxes or standard streaming sticks, 24 does not divide evenly into 60. This means the TV alternates between showing one film frame for two refreshes and the next for three refreshes, leading to 3:2 pull-down. This creates an uneven limping cadence, completely distinct from OLED stutter. Why does turning off motion smoothing not solve the problem? There are other issues to consider When it comes to motion smoothing, turning the feature off and simply leaving it can lead you to motion purgatory. Many streaming boxes, like Roku, Chromecast with Google TV, or even older Firesticks, output a fixed 60 Hz HDMI signal by default. Even if your TV has a native 120Hz panel capable of a 5x pull-down (repeating every 24 fps frame exactly 5 times), it can't reconstruct the 24p cadence if the streaming stick baked a 3x2 pull-down into the signal before it reached the HDMI port. Built-in TV apps like WebOS, Tizen, Google TV, or Netflix can often bypass HDMI timing issues, but they secretly re-engage vendor post-processing profiles under HDR and Dolby Vision modes even if you disable them in SDR. Variable refresh rate, or VRR, can also lead to conflicts. Leaving game mode or ALLM enabled for media consumption disables the TV's cadence reconstruction algorithms entirely, forcing 60Hz pull-down judder directly onto movies. How can you solve the problem? There are some settings you can adjust So what is the real solution? The best option is to actually turn on Filmmaker Mode. The setting name depends on your TV brand. With LG TVs, it's sometimes called Real Cinema Mode, and it forces a 5x5 pull-down on 120Hz panels. On Sony TVs, it's often called Motion Flow, set to Custom, with CineMotion set to High. On Samsung TVs, you can adjust Picture Clarity to Custom, then set Film Mode to Auto. These features are designed to extract 24p from 60p/60i signals, so they should hopefully fix the judder for you. The UHD Alliance introduced these filmmaker modes to automatically disable smoothing, correct color temperatures to D65, and lock the native aspect ratio with a single metadata flag. But the missing piece is that filmmaker mode correctly turns on aggressive MEMC interpolation, but it does nothing to fix OLED sample-and-hold stutter. For viewers, it's still sensitive to OLED strobe and bus-kick pans, and standard filmmaker mode will leave them right back in the starter trap unless they manually customize their motion submenu. You can do this by adjusting your interpolation settings. Don't just leave it on a binary on/off toggle. Instead, switch to custom/user mode, set de-blur to 0 or low because it's not needed for 24p, and set de-judder to 1 or 2, which is typically out of 10. Motion smoothing isn't great But you have to understand the alternative The battle against motion smoothing was 100% justified, but the advice given to consumers was seemingly too simplistic. Blindly turning off every motion setting on a modern OLED ignores the physics of sub-millisecond pixel response times and sample-and-hold display technology. Stop toggling motion smoothing between two extremes. By enabling filmmaker mode and manually customizing your interpolation, you can enjoy your movies the way the directors graded them in the studio and hopefully avoid both judder and stutter.