Apple TV 2 has big problems homesharing - fixes? firmware update needed!

I don't understand how multicast storms could explain the loss of Home Share visibility, when AirPlay works flawlessly? Everything in my setup runs wirelessly, and when I "push" movies and music from either of my computers to the ATV2 unit, they play through without an issue. But if Home Sharing is used to browse my libraries and I "pull" something, the connection will inevitably drop out. This is all over WiFi, between the same units/devices, just one is pushed, the other is pulled. This has to be a software/firmware-related issue.

The AirPlay service is broadcast from the AppleTV2 device. Home Sharing is broadcast from the system(s) running iTunes. If there is a multicast storm on your network, it could impact some but not all multicast services. Sometimes some devices get a connection which provides advantages for their multicast service on the network. The Home Sharing service may need improvement, I am not writing that there is not an issue with it. However approaching the problem from this angle worked for me. You can check if a multicast storm a.k.a. broadcast radiation is causing issues for the machines running Home sharing by using a bonjour browser utility and reviewing which services the utility can see, preferably from a system that is not sharing or subscribing. There is a utility for the iPhone called Discovery Bonjour Browser. The Mac OS App Store has another called iNet. Safari includes a bonjour browser in the "Show all bookmarks" option, but that only presents bonjour services with http interfaces and printers for me. The MacOS included Network Utility provides Netstat which shows the multicast routing table. Comparing the routing tables on the machines offering Home Sharing may reveal something. If you are able to get a bonjour browser and see all devices advertising services on your network, you may want to test by powering down devices contributing to the multicast storm theory. Take printers, network cameras, iPads, iPhones and all other things out of the mix when you nest try using Home Sharing. Does the connection still drop when only 1 iTunes share and 1 ATV2 are multicast routing? If so, then what is the difference in their connection? Could 1 be wired and the other WiFi? Could 1 have an 802.11g connection while the other has 802.11n? It is unknown if the router or WiFi access point you use properly handles multicast information between any differences the service offeror and the service subscriber.

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I'm currently at my laptop. I have iTunes 10.6 running, and my ATV2 unit is on.

The ATV unit can see my Home Share library on my laptop, but iTunes is not seeing the ATV2 unit, which means I cannot AirPlay anything.

I'm using the Bonjour discovery app for my iPhone and it can see five items:

1. iTunes Home Sharing

2. Remote Audio Output Protocol (ATV2)

3. Sleep Proxy Server

4. _airplay._tcp

5. _appletv-v2._tcp

The details beneath each of these are a little too complicated for me to understand, but I can see that the AirPlay service of the ATV2 unit is broadcasting itself properly. So why can't my iTunes see it? It was working yesterday, I watched a near-2-hour movie using it. I shall play something from the Home Share library, and see what happens to visible services in Bonjour Discovery app when the connection drops...

Well, that didn't take long - I tried to browse my Home Share library on the AppleTV unit and it simply timed out. Now it no longer sees my laptops Home Share. According to the Discovery Bonjour app nothing has changed, all services are still broadcasting their presence.

OK, so I've rebooted the router and left everything else alone.

Now iTunes has made AirPlay available, and I can push music and video (as I have always been able to do).

But the AppleTV unit cannot see my Home Share on the laptop. I've tried stopping and restarting Home Sharing in iTunes, and restarting iTunes altogether. ATV just cannot see it :-(

Checking the Bonjour Discovery app I see that, again, nothing has apparently changed (except the iTunes Home Sharing item disappeared and reappeared with each restart of Home Sharing/iTunes).

This is getting very frustrating.

In an effort to get to the bottom of this, I excluded my router and all extraneous devices by enabling the "My WiFi" feaature on my laptop. This uses the laptop's wireless capavility as a router. I created a new WiFi network this way, and only added my Apple TV. This meant the laptop, with iTunes, and the AppleTV are on an exclusive network, with no other devices nor internet traffic.

And what's happened? The ATV was able to see Home Share, for about 5 minutes. Now it's lost it again. iTunes can still AirPlay, but the ATV unit has lost connection to iTunes Home Share.

As nothing else is on this bespoke network, I can't image the ATV is broadcast storming itself into oblivion? I still maintain there's a problem with Bonjour for Apple TV, and I'm getting quite fed up now.

I had a similar problem using Windows 7 and resolved it by installing an earlier version of the Bonjour service to version 1.0.106. I haven't read the whole thread so apologies if this has already been mentioned. Also I appreciate this may not help MAC OS users but perhaps this is a course of action which you might want to investigate.

I certainly feel everyone's frustration. This is a great thread tho for all the work arounds. I unhooked all the Wifi syncs, added all the ports. What finally got it working was enabling multicast on my router. We'll see if it sticks.

To all: I too have just now started to lose my Home Sharing using ATV2. I never had ANY problems until recently (about the past month). I have a LinkSys Router, and use Apple Airport for my wifi set up. I only have problems with losing the homesharing connect. Netflix stream just fine as do other non homesharing features. I am convinced it has to do with recent ATV2 software upgrades and Lion or iTunes upgrades or both. I never had this problem before. I spoke with Applecare and he was aware of this issue and suggest reinstalling iTunes but that did not solve the problem.

PLEASE anyone with a fix or suggestion it will be welcome. Everyone who is experienceing this needs to contact Applecare or Apple Support and complain like ****!

Come on Apple, fix it!

Just to add myself to the chorus of "me too" – I have the same problem. A restart will occasionally fix it, but not always.

I have ATV2 (with new software), Airport Extreme (on 5gHz network), iMac with home sharing – the content is on an external hardrive (which is liked to the Airport Extreme).

Content starts playing, looks like it's preloading nicely, and then it'll just stop. When I try going back, I get the Home Sharing message. Sometimes I can play using Remote on the iPhone (using AirPlay).

It's been more and more frequent over the past few weeks although to be honest, Home Sharing has always been flaky for me. I put it down the movies being on the external drive, but life's too short to look into all these things properly.

I'm just amazed that, even in an all-Apple house, it still doesn't work flawlessly.

We too are an all Apple house. I just hooked up the brand new ATV Third Generation (1080 HD) last night and it too loses the Homesharing. My plan was to move my ATV 2nd Generation to the Family room. Anyway I am convinced this is a software issue, either a recent upgraqde of Lion or iTunes. I called Applecare again and the tech support also stated it has to be some sort of software issue. My wife is bringing my iMac and ATV2 to the Apple Stire today with my case #. I never had a problem, ever with home sharing. Everything was working up until these past few weeks. I know this becasue last month I had finished editing and creating several new movies, each aboyut 45 minutes in length and they all played perfectly. Here is a question, although I keep losing the home share connection, my scfreen saver still plays the images from my iphoto library that I've chosen. Does the ATV cache those images in some internal memory for the screen saver? It would seem it must because if home sharing is not connected it should not stream those images.

Lastly again for the record everything else not home sharing related works just fine, like NetFlix, PhotoStream, etc, just anything that uses iphoto images, movies, and iTunes.

Apple are you listening? Please again everyone who is experiencing this please call Apple. Even my tech syupport call, he said we need to do this, that is how it gets excellerated up to the development and support teams.

With regards to buffering: Yes, the ATV units do buffer images for the screensaver. I've seen this in action when using Internet image searches for my screensaver images, which play even when the internet connectivity is lost (I know this isn't stricly Home Sharing, but the same buffering strategy is probably in place regardless of the image source).

When I called Technical Support regarding this issue they eventually stopped trying to help me because they ran out of ideas!

APPLE! Please listen! You really must elevate this issue to your highest priority in R&D!

Thanks for the confirmation related to buffering. My wife's appointment with Apple is in about 45 minutes. I will update everyone after this showdown.

I have been having the same issue recently of my ATV2's randomly losing Home Sharing and after trying a slew of options one seems to have worked for me as of last night.

I have an Apple Extreme broadcasting my wifi network and all three ATV2's are accessing the home network via wifi. After interrogating my Comcast modem I noticed there was a number of warning error messages in the log concerning DHCP lease and being unable to receive a response [sorry I dont have exact wording to hand].

I went into my Apple Extreme and found a DHCP Lease Renewal option set to Every Day in the Network Session. I changed this to 365 Days and ever since (as of last night) I have had no further dropouts. Last night I successfully watched two programs lasting 29minutes and 65 minutes respectively without incident: before, I was getting dropped out after 6-10 minutes.

I'm really uncertain why this is working and am unsure of any other ramifications of setting this to 365 days but it works for me so for now I'm very, very happy. My rough theory is that having failed to renew the DHCP lease at some point it was continuously pinging Apple and the failure to get a response was somehow disrupting the Home Sharing. Sounds odd to me but as I say, it works, so this may be worth a try for others.

HAs anyone tried updating to the new 10.6.1 version of itunes to see if it solves the problem?