Apple TV 2nd Generation slow streaming fo…

Mar 1, 2011 2:55 AM in response to TonyGW

To TonyGW, many thanks.

As one who has contributed to this thread, and listened as many people described bits of the problem (and just as many who muddied the water with irrelevancies and tangents) I am pleased to see the bits come together at last. I think it's all over now folks. The lesson I take away is to realize that each of the (useful) contributors were like blind men trying to describe an elephant by reference only to the bit they are holding onto. Many were close, and one put the bits together. Now we can all get on .... And wait patiently until the iSteves sort it out with a patch as we all know they inevitably will. Does anyone know how to mark this problem 'answered' ?

For others for whom discussion threads substitute for social interaction and informed comment, please try to move on.

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Mar 1, 2011 6:39 AM in response to Jeremy in Canberra

Jeremy -
I too have been following this discussion for a long time as well as discussions about interrupted Netflix downloads, which represent 95% of the experience I have with our ATV...even after our initial unit was replaced.

While I understand your position, I would not consider the problem answered until the fix is in. The fix may be a patch. It may be a hardware upgrade. It may be a different way of routing downloads.

There are a lot of contributing factors, which most of us have discovered: e.g. ISP downloads (mine now average 20 Mb/sec), Wi-Fi signals (mine currently has a Sound to Noise Ration of 18 to 22 and a Thruput Rate of 65 - 72 on our 2.4 Ghz network...Not bad, but not as good as I experience with our MacBook Pro, much less our iMac).

Both my ISP, Comcast, and Apple Care have been very helpful. A Comcast Tech came to the house and found noise...which he fixed. He also upgraded our modem. Apple Care has worked attentively. Netflix, on the other hand, has provided very limited support.

I've seen a lot of improvement but no definitive fix.

I, therefore, think it is important for us to continue to lobby for one. I'm not advocating protests in the street (a la Cairo), but instead continued...respectful...posting here as well as Apple Care calls.

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3MTA3

Level 1

0 points

Mar 15, 2011 10:58 PM in response to shuanglong

This did the trick. I have an airport extreme feeding the house. I had two airport expresses to help. Streaming movies stored on iMac to ATV2. Movies would clock. If they did start they would play for 5-25 minutes then boot me to the menu page of apple tv. I simply unplugged both airport expresses, restarted extreme and voila! Thanks

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Mar 19, 2011 2:20 PM in response to jprice126

Well, I've tried most of the solutions listed here, and my downloads and streaming are still SLOW. I have a MacBook Air, 24" CinemaDisplay, Airport Extreme and 2 Airport Expresses. There are also 2 PC's on the network, and 2 Canon printers. It all functions perfectly EXCEPT for the ATV.

I gave up my ThinkPad for a MacBook so I wouldn't have to fiddle with resets and restarts. As an Apple product on an Apple network, it should just work, and seamlessly at that! ATV is going back to the store just because I don't need the frustration. If they ever figure out the problems, maybe I'll try it then.

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Mar 19, 2011 9:00 PM in response to jprice126

I have been having slowness and just buggy behaivior in general since the recent update. Movies stop and I get the main Apple TV screen all of a sudden, without warning. The Pause button virtually kills the video stream and it takes forever to get going again.

This ATV2 was great GREAT until I did a recent update. Now it is just infuriating to deal with. My WiFi is just fine, as my iPhone works just dandy on the home network. It has to be the ATV itself. I have rebooted it and reset it and restarted my iMac with my iTunes library... but still the same result

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Mar 20, 2011 3:23 PM in response to Daniel Clark

Well, I restored the ATV2 and got a fresh connection. I am trying one little thing that may not mean much, but everything is working now as it was normally a few weeks ago.

I went into Keychain Access and changed my Access Control for my wireless to "allow all applications to access this item"

Like I said, I can't believe this little thing would fix all the streaming issues I am having, but so far, so good.

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Apr 3, 2011 12:55 PM in response to Daniel Clark

Hi.

Not sure if this discussion is complete or not - but I thought I'd post my findings and resolutions here.

I don't use Mac's but the wireless / streaming issues seem to be the same regardless of what platform you use.

I have a dedicated iTunes machine which does nothing else except serve the 2 ATV2's that I have on my network. I don't stream from the internet, so I have no experience of this.

I had massive issues with streaming over wireless, I couldn't get the library to load and if it did, I couldn't then load any movies. So below, I have listed the hardware I am using and the tweaks I have made to get the Apple as reliable as possible.

Server - AMD Phenom II (dual core 3.2GHZ), 4GB Memory, 1.5TB SATA Drive, 1GBPS Network Card, Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

Wireless / ADSL - D-Link DAP1353 Wirless Access Point, Netgear DGN2000 ADSL Router

The Access Point and the iTunes server are connected through the 4 port 100MBPS switch at the back of the Netgear. I have turned off the integrated wireless that the Netgear has.

First, I have changed the router to 5GHZ only - this bandwidth seems to be less congested around my area. I then restricted the connections to the router to 100+MBPS only or in the "n" specification. This ensures that the ATV's ONLY connect at 100MBPS+.

Second, the encryption type is set to WPA2- Personal / AES and I found that both the Apple TV's would fail a re-association during a group key update. To stop this (and stop the frustration of loosing connectivity during the middle of a movie)I increased the key update time to 43200 seconds - every 12 hours.

I have then scanned the channels in my area and found that 13 is the clearest. So, I changed the Dlink transmit channel to this one.

The ATV's suck all the available bandwidth that your wireless can offer, especially when streaming HD content, and they seem particularly subsceptable to wireless interference.

I have been running both Apple TV2's at the bottom and top floor of my house with the Wireless Access Point in the middle.

This seems to be the most reliable setup that I have found so far, but having said that, the top ATV has dropped out 3 times in the last 30 minutes with no trace or errors from the Access point.

I have also found that the units seem to be more reliable if no other devices are on the same wireless channel.

What I also seem to get is that the sound doesn't get transmitted through the HDMI cable but the picture does - therefore no stream from the Apple TV2. This is cured by a reset, as is the disconnection in most cases.

I hope this helps some people, and does not "muddy the waters" and would appreciate feedback if you guys have any.

Cheers,

BigDaddyCainer

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Apr 10, 2011 9:29 AM in response to jprice126

Fixed!! 🙂

Updated iTunes to 10.2.1 from 10.1.2, and updated the ATV2 from 4.1 to 4.2.1 (2100) this morning.

All slow loading problems gone. Works like a charm now.

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Apr 18, 2011 12:48 PM in response to jprice126

Like others I am having similar issues, except one ATV2 works/streams perfectly fine, and the other does not since the 4.2 upgrade. I have a dedicated itunes server on the 2nd level of my home with one ATV2 on the same level and one on the bottom level 10 feet from my router. The ATV2 that is 10 feet from the router will bring up my library and I can scroll through it's content, however ANY movie (HD or not) just produces the spinning wheel!!! The other ATV2 on the 2nd floor loads quickly and is ALWAYS responsive. The issue with the other ATV2 just started with the update. I have FIOS and my speeds are where they should be; router see's all wireless devices as it should and had no problems prior to the upgrade. Should I do a restore???

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kent909

Level 1

17 points

Apr 21, 2011 10:22 PM in response to Pogoxenia

I was also having this problem. Saw your post about the Airport Express and unplugged mine and the problem went away. However it reduced my wifi speed too much for using my iPad in that end of the house. Like you when I plugged my AE back in the problem was back. What I discovered is that my Extreme and Express were both set to channel 10. When I changed the Express to channel 7 all is working perfectly now. I hope this solves your problem.

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Jun 22, 2011 6:46 PM in response to kent909

I was having the same issue and this is how I fixed it:

🙂

- used "istumbler" to scan wifi networks around me

- looked into them and found the less used CHANNEL

- switch my wireless router to work on the non (less) used channel

Everything working like a charm...😉

Hope it helps!

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Aug 7, 2011 6:39 AM in response to jprice126

I have been suffering from similar problems, i tried everything suggested - dolby digital off, selecting from iPad but then stumbled upon something really obvious on my router page. I had a new router install a few weeks ago and it had reverted to 2.4ghz mode from the normally selected 5ghz mode.

If you have this option (especially if youre a virgin media customer in the uk) this will fix it instantly.

Nothing hangs now, HD movies start instantly, no hang time at all

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Motime

Level 1

0 points

Aug 14, 2011 3:31 AM in response to jprice126

I was having the same issue like everyone else. I found out the problem is with air play. To solve problem you need to update the firmware on your time capsule which fixed the problem immediately. If you have another type of access point update the firmware and that might do the trick. Goodluck

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j184

Level 1

4 points

Sep 3, 2011 3:49 PM in response to jprice126

Summary Recommendation

Actions taken to improve browsing time for my itunes hosted movie collection on ATV2:

Ensure movies in iTunes have cover art
Disable realtime virus scan on movies folder, itunes.exe process, ituneslibrary.xml

Detail

Background:

Problem: browsing movies on the ATV2 shared from my win7 PC/itunes PC was taking a long time just to load up the list of movies.
My set up: Atom processor, 4GB ram, Gigabit to the router, 100MB to the ATV....... "just meant to be a media server"
All 200+ movies ripped using Handbrake using the Apple TV2 setting.

Analysis performed:

Noticed that when no cover art in a movie file, that ATV would have to generate a thumbnail to render on the screen.

Using the Resource Monitor in windows 7, sorted CPU processes by CPU (usage); sorted Disk by disk read.

Noted that when when the thumbnails were being generated, there was a lot of CPU cycles consumed by itunes AND my antivirus product (MS Security Essentials). Atom processor is not powerful, so this likely contributed to the impact of these processes having to run at the same time.

By adding artwork to the movie files (easily done in iTunes, although tedious on a large library..... if anyone knows a program that can do this in bulk on windows, i'd be interested to hear) I think this got me most of the performance gains. I suspect that because the embedded artwork image is displayed by the ATV2, there is no need for iTunes to create one on the fly (involving both disk and cpu time).

⚠While I would never normally suggest to exclude any files folders from a virus scan, I know that all files coming in to my system will be scanned prior to them ending in my movie or other folders. Due to the writes' back to the library file by itunes.exe I excluded both of these from the realtime virus scan.

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Oct 17, 2011 5:43 AM in response to jprice126

My network is complex but in summary, the ADSL router is on one side of the house in my home office (where the iMac and movies reside) and I've a repeater on the other side of the house connected to the router via a homeplug which uses the mains electricity circuit as a long network cable. It's to this that the Apple TV connects.

With a little testing I found that the Apple TV was performing very poorly when the homeplug was plugged into an extension cable block (along with the Apple TV, home cinema, TV etc). But by moving the homeplug to the main wall socket (leaving the other devices in the extension block) made all the difference. No issues at all.

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Apple TV 2nd Generation slow streaming for Movies from my iTunes