How do i setup ATV using a ethernet cable?

when an ethernet cable is connected, wifi if automatically disabled.
if wifi is staying active it means that either the ethernet cable is faulty, or it is not connected to a live network.

simply connecting an ethernet cable to your pc is not making a live network.

do you have a router? you usually get one of these form your ISP for internet.

if you do, then the ethernet cable should be connected to that. (and your pc should have a cable to the router as well).

if you don't, then you would need to create a network on your PC, but as you admit you are not an expert, that is probably going to be too hard explain how to do.

As Chenks said having an ethernet connection active should disable wireless on AppleTV.

There are a couple of things that could be up:

1 - faulty cable
2 - wrong type of cable, there are 2 types of network cable called patch and crossover cables - crossover cables connect two devices directly, whereas patch cables connect a computer and other devices to each other via a router or switch of some kind. Modern equipment can often compensate for the type of equipment anyay so this may not be the issue.
3 - the network port on the PC may not be active or configured for networking - try going to Network connections and seeing if there's an option to set up a new network connection, there used to be a step by step method of doing this between windows PCs, but I wouldn't have thought you'd need to do this.
4 - Do you have a firewall eg Zone Alarm - you may need to configure the new connection to allow devices to talk to each other.
5 - Make sure itunes is running

AC

How do you get internet access?

Is it a USB modem? If so, I'm just wondering if you knew that AppleTv also requires internet access itself.

AC

S11MPE wrote:
Alley_Cat - yes, i use a USB modem and the Apple store told me i could still use ATV if the computer was on and connected. - is this correct?

I'm not sure to be honest, as by default your internet connection may not be shared by Windows across ethernet. Now you may well be able to allow internet connection sharing to occur but you might have to set it up in the Network settings.

To put things like music/videos/pictures onto AppleTV or to stream them on the fly iTunes acts as the controlling program to transfer things, but it does not share the internet connection. AppleTv looks for an internet connection itself.

Without AppleTv seeing the internet directly you would not be able to watch film/tv show previews, access YouTube or the various picture gallery options.

If you've ever bought stuff from iTunes you probably know the files are mostly protected and you can only have 5 authorised computers for playback. AppleTv sin't one of them, but it also has to do authorisation for certain things, eg direct purchases and rentals, and I suspect starting rental movie playback. I think it also authorises directly over the internet to play iTunes purchased files as if Apple's servers are busy you sometimes temporarily get things to play. Once the AppleTv is authorised for your account playback of purchased media should be fine without an internet connection to it, but rentals are a different kettle of fish.

I have brought the cable today so hopefully this is not faulty but i believe it is a patch cabel - would a crossover cable work?

If I was connecting two computers direct to each other, and you effectively are doing this, I would use a crossover cable - patch cables would not have worked some years ago, but more modern devices can sometimes autosense the cable and compensate automatically, so it's not a hard and fast rule anymore, but tends to apply to gigabit network connections which I don't think AppleTV has.

I've never connected my computer direct to the AppleTv simply with a cable to know and as they're in different rooms I couldn't easily test it.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernetcrossovercable

I will check my firewall.
Thanks for your help - if you can help further?

Depends on who your ISP is, but you might even consider getting a cheap router or modem/router instead of the USB device. This would not need to be wireless per se, but lets see if we can progress things with your exisitng kit first.

AC

I have the same problem.

I usually connect my Apple TV to my (XP) Laptop via a home wireless network through a router, which works fine. However, I cannot get the Apple TV to pick up on the Internet Connection established through a 3G USB Modem (which means no authorization and no purchased content can play...)

To simplify things, I connect the ATV directly to the Laptop via Ethernet cable (you have to ensure the IP addresses are in the same domain to get the network to work), again no issue to connect ATV and iTunes, and iTunes works with the Internet connection. However, I can't get the ATV to use the internet connection to authorize the device.

Any help would be hugely appreciated...
Tx

PS (You're problem should be solved by fiddling with your IP addresses, i.e. set you PC IP to 192.168.0.1 and the Apple TV to 192.168.0.2)

ok, I finally solved it. I bridged the wrong network with the 3G connection... oops.

Is this a cable modem or a dial up modem? If it is a cable modem and it has an ethernet port, the easiest way to set it up is to get a ethernet switch and connect it to the ethernet port on the modem, and then connect your computer and apple tv via ethernet to the switch. Ethernet switches are rather cheap (20-30 bucks).

Glor

3g would indicate that it's a umts modem as in like a 3g cellphone but just for data
looks mostly like this
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/uploads/Image/tmobukmodem.jpg

Your looking at Eben's post. I was responding to the original poster.


Glor

What operating system is running on your PC? Windows XP? I can tell you how to do a couple of things if this is the case, just want to know if it would be the info you need.

Silly me, just saw that you are running XP as indicated at the bottom of your posts. Sorry for missing that. Here's what I have for you:

With Windows XP you would do the following to Bridge the connections:
1. Click Start, Control Panel -or- Start, Settings, Control Panel
2. Double Click Network Connections
3. In the window that opens you will see all network adapters installed on your Windows PC.
Note: based off of what I have read here you should at least see your 3G USB modem listed as well as your Ethernet Adapter (sometimes shown as Local Area Connection).
4. Hold down the control key (CTRL) on your keyboard and click the two adapters icons you want to Bridge one time each.
5. While holding down the control key (CTRL) on your keyboard, right-click one of the adapters' icons and you should see the Bridge Connections option in the menu that appears.

A message window will popup that says "please wait while windows bridges the connections". Unfortunately this is about as far as I was able to go because the only two adapters I have are an ethernet adapter and a IEEE1394 adapter (firewire) with no device attached to the firewire adapter.

However, if this doesn't work out with Windows XP you may also have the option of setting up Internet Connection Sharing on your adapter that connects to the router (the Ethernet adapter). To do this:
1. If you have setup a Bridge, select both adapters, right click one and select "remove from bridge".
2. Right click the bridge and select delete.
3. Right click the Ethernet Adapter and select "properties"
4. Click the Advanced Tab
5. Since the ethernet adapter does not have connection to the internet, it should have the option available in the center of this properties window that says "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's internet connection". It is a box that you check and click OK.

After doing this, and I cannot confirm for you ahead of time (unfortunately as my resources are limited to do so) all you should have to do is set the Apple TV to use DHCP to obtain an IP address and possibly restart the Apple TV as well to ensure it obtains a new IP address.

The only problem is I cannot verify whether this is "supposed to work" or not since at the moment I do not have an additional / seperate internet connection to connect to my XP computer that I have to test it out. My internet connection is DSL through a DSL modem that has an ethernet port so I just run it through my router and both my PC and ATV run straight to the router. In other words the router provides the internet connection availability to both devices as oppposed to one sharing the internet across the router to the other.

Which makes me now remember something that my boss found a while back that we have used with a Verizon PCMCIA EVDO network adapter.
http://www.topglobalusa.com/product2_01.asp?newsid=20031114093603324&classid=102 103102
Not trying to advertise another company's product on Apple's website or anything, but since we are talking about an Apple TV and it's iTunes library host computer both needing to use a 3G internet connection then we should be ok to discuss a router that has the capability to provide client devices this type of connection. This is basically a router that takes a Cellular Provider's (in your case your 3G) internet connection and shares it over 802.11 wireless and it also has one Ethernet Port (for a PC or a multi-port switch). The one we got uses a PCMCIA Slot for the carrier connection, and I don't know if USB is an option on the one we have but by now (1 year later) there may be some available that have USB or both. It's another piece of equipment to purchase but since you are using a 3G internet connection I would wager that Cable or DSL isn't available to you in your area thus making most routers designed for DSL / Cable connection sharing only partially useful. This would be a great solution if you could either find one that uses USB or if you could obtain a PCMCIA card from your provider.
My boss took this on a road trip and his kids had their iPod touches and laptops out the whole time using the internet in the car. When I was a kid we had magnetic board games, woo hoo 🙂.

Since I wasn't able to fully test the Windows bridging and Internet Connection Sharing option I hope the info I did provide isn't misleading or confusing. Anybody that knows more about actually doing this please correct me where I may have left something out or misunderstood something completely. Now that I am curious about it I will look around the net to see if I spot any 3G routers that use USB connections and let you know.