When playing Radio Stations on ATV, the music will play for a while, 10 to 20 minutes, and then the ATV freezes and the music stops playing. At this point the ATV is completely frozen up. In a few more minutes, ATV will reboot and everything is fine, once again.
Are there any settings in my Airport Extreme Base Station that can be set differently to keep this from happening? Or, is this an issue with ATV?
Settings are unlikely to cause such issues, but interference or other issues on your network can. You might want to try changing channel, toggling internet robustness or adjusting your multicast rate.
Winston Churchill wrote:
I don't fully understand you there. If your computer freezes you reboot it yourself, the tv just does it for you.
So software 3.0 just reboots if there's a problem/error?
That's crazy.
Hardly a compelling feature.
If AppleTv is hanging/freezing then the software is buggy/crashing - they should address/fix this and give useful error messages if it's not recoverable not just force a reboot - otherwise if the fault lies outside AppleTV the reboot will potentially be cyclical as the fault could be elsewhere and you have no indication what it is.
If it's frozen, how would it generate an error message and if it did would we necessarily understand it.
It's my understanding that the tv has always rebooted itself, I don't recall anyone ever reporting an error message other than it's encountered an error and needs to restart, but presumably it can only generate such a message when it's about to freeze not when it's actually frozen.
Not that it means a lot, but I left my kitchen tv playing a radio station for a couple of days, so it seems to be something else rather than just playing radio stations. Corrupt packets over the network maybe, I really don't know. But I do know I can recreate similar situations by using certain devices in certain ways with my mac and cause it to freeze with no error message. Indeed I'm not aware of any devices that tell you why they have frozen when they do, are you?
Alley_Cat wrote:
My point is that it shouldn't freeze regularly under normal circumstances.
I agree, but we don't know that these are normal conditions, if (and only because it was brought up earlier), there is interference on the network, that's not normal.
Winston Churchill wrote:
Indeed I'm not aware of any devices that tell you why they have frozen when they do, are you?
Perhaps I'm not explaining my point well - it should not freeze - if it does either there's a software bug/corruption or a hardware component is hanging unexpectedly.
AppleTv essentially runs a media centre software application from start up.
If you were using your computer and entering data in a spreadsheet and it repeatedly crashed or hung requiring a reboot you'd consider this a software bug or poor error handling.
It shouldn't happen and you'd get pretty fed up with the unreliability.
If however it hung when using any kind of app you'd be more inclined to consider hardware faults or OS corruption causing the hang.
I'm not saying computers don't hang, just that if they do it's usually down to a software bug or unrecoverable error condition, or hardware failing.
We know there are genuine issues with this current software version that there haven't generally been before. If this is another one of these issues then no it shouldn't happen, however we shouldn't now be assuming that all problems are of this nature and aren't simply caused by some outside factor that can be corrected.
The issues that we know about I can either recreate by following the same procedure (ie album art) or can't because I don't have the set up to recreate it (ie HDMI) but accept that it exists because of the volume and reliability of the users posting such problems. I have neither heard this issue before nor am able to recreate it, I accept it exists but believe it may be as a result of specific unusual circumstances.
You obviously feel that the tv should be able to tell the user of these exceptional circumstances, whereas I feel its asking a lot, since a normal computer couldn't do that, nor could anything if these exceptional circumstances were just overwhelming the tv and causing it to freeze. You obviously feel that it shouldn't just reboot under such circumstances, whereas I think it's exceptionally good that it does. These are just different opinions.
The OP asked if it might be their network settings, I agree it is unlikely, but I felt it worth mentioning I thought it could be other network issues, the implication of which was that I didn't see any harm in say, trying ethernet, changing the wifi channel etc etc.
The OP hasn't really given much more info, so we haven't had much chance to expand the matter or explore other avenues, we don't know if this occurs for just radio or for all content, all I was trying to do was leave all options open.
In your example of a computer crashing when entering info into a spreadsheet, yes if this happened every time I'd suspect the spreadsheet software, but if the data was being entered over the internet by another user, I'd find it difficult to rule out the internet and continue to blame the spreadsheet application.
I'm not sure how much stuff you have connected to your computer, I have a lot and I generally find that any problems I have are down to outside connections. I can't say I haven't but I'm reasonably confident my computer has never frozen except for the reason of a third party device attached to it.
Winston Churchill wrote:
I don't fully understand you there. If your computer freezes you reboot it yourself, the tv just does it for you.
I've made one change from your list of suggestions, Winston. I tried changing the channel on the Airport Extreme Base Station from 2 to 6. It did not change anything. ATV still freezes up after playing a radio station for a while. With touching ATV, it will reboot, by itself, in about half an hour, or so.
I am running my AEBS in "Create a Wireless Network", Allow this network to be extended, radio mode 802.11a/n - 802.11b/g
The Airport Express is running in, "Extend a wireless network" with; allow wireless clients.
Let me know if there's any other info you'd like to know.
Actually I'm not convinced it's your network, all I was pointing out in the first place is that we shouldn't exclude it from our list of possibilities.
Do you have a need to extend your network, why do you have the express.
By any chance are you syncing your other content by automatic sync.
