Streaming movies freeze, pause and re-buffer amm the time

Run a program like net monitor to see what your network speeds are
when syncing to the ATV (even though you are not syncing files).
This will give you a clue as to your overall
network performance. If your speeds are slow then tweak your network
by changing channels or moving the base station until the situation improves.
Are you using wireless security options? Switch to mac address access control instead.

sounds like you have a slow network... could be interference with the wireless signal (neighbors WiFI, other 5GHz devices, more walls, long distance etc)

try this...
open activity monitor and go to networking
set a movie to sync to the appleTV, then initiate the sync
in activity monitor you can see what kind of transfer rates you are getting

5GHz is faster (do you have wide bands enabled to get the speed boost?) but over a shorter distance and more apt to be affected by walls, floors etc.. 2.4GHz is better in this respect but more apt to be effected by other 2.4GHz devices because more wireless devices, WiFi networks etc work in this radio band.

1st figure out if your network is slow..

should be able to get 5MB/s... what you are getting should be enough for streaming...

don't know if you've done this already but as a default i always try rebooting the appleTV if something funny is happening... press and hold menu + down button until light turns amber.. pick language.. pick restart.. this solved like 99% percent of problems.

hmm.. what happens in activity monitor if you start to play a movie on appleTV... you should see it max out at about 5MB/s and then after about 5-10mins is should come down..

where are your movies stored.. internal or external drive, NAS..?

Same problem, although the network is ethernet. 7 min. and the ATV starts freezing. The ATV is synced with iTunes on a MacMini. iTunes files are stored on an external drive (FireWire 400).

I have the same problem. I did a factory reset (back to 2.0.2) and the problem went away.

Upgrading to 2.3.1 made it reappear.

Has anybody made progress on this issue?

Could the Firewire drive be powering down after a certain period - it may be that AppleTV gets enough data quickly to buffer adequately, stops buffering for a while, then when it needs to rebuffer the drive has gone to sleep.

The software may also have changed the way it buffers somehow.