Apple TV 2: Slow Download / Loading / Ready To Play Times

Question

Level 1

8 points

Apple TV 2: Slow Download / Loading / Ready To Play Times

I've been very disappointed so far with trying to rent TV shows to watch on my Apple TV 2 and I'm wondering if someone can explain the process it is going through before it allows you to watch something you've rented.

Here's my experience so far:

I chose an hour long TV episode to rent / watch. Apple TV 2 tells me that it will be 45 minutes before it's ready to watch. This seems extremely long to me as I've got very fast connection speeds and the Apple TV 2 is hard connected to my ethernet (it's close enough to the router so that I can get away with not using Wi-Fi. Considering that downloads from iTunes are 720p, not 1080p, why would it need to download for an entire 45 minutes? If I try to rent the same show on my MacBook Pro, it is ready to watch within 5 minutes. Does the Apple TV 2 not allow you to start watching what is already buffered while it continues to download?

I decide to just let it download in the background and watch it another time. Two days later I turn on the Apple TV 2 and it says the show is ready to watch. So I hit play and I get "Loading..." with the spinny dashes ball. It does that for a while and then tells me: "Ready To Watch in 15 minutes". I wait for about 5 minutes before I get frustrated and just decide not to watch it again. If it has fully downloaded the content and says it's "Ready To Watch" in the menu, then why does it need another 15 minutes to load it from memory? It should be instantly available at that point.

Any suggestions? Comments? Similar experiences?

MacBook Pro & iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Dec 6, 2010 2:04 PM

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Answer 1

vazandrew

Level 8

40,348 points

Dec 6, 2010 2:55 PM in response to nmancer666

It is downloading to the flash drive and will be ready to start once it has loaded enough so you can watch uninterrupted.

Example, I rented a movie the other night. It was ready to play after 5 seconds but I think the full movie took 45 minutes to load.

Check the forums, others have had issues and changed a network setting on ATV2 and that solves it.

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Answer 2

nmancer

Level 1

10 points

Dec 6, 2010 3:42 PM in response to nmancer666

Can you point me to a specific thread? I've scoured the discussion forums for the ATV2 and all I can find are a lot of similar posts to mine with a LOT of people complaining about the same problem, but no solutions. The only threads I've seen with suggestions are regarding using Wi-Fi, which I stated above that I'm not, I'm using a hard ethernet connection, and one about having the Apple TV 2 set to use HDCP instead of manual IP address and I'm doing that already too.

From what I've been able to read on the forums, there are a lot of people upset about this problem.

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Answer 3

vazandrew

Level 8

40,348 points

Dec 6, 2010 3:55 PM in response to nmancer

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2608444&start=210&tstart=0

The last post on this thread was the most recent one I recall.

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Answer 4

Dec 6, 2010 8:02 PM in response to vazandrew

There are two issues with the ATV2 that need fixed. I have a slow DSL internet hook up, but could still rent a movie with my ATV1 and start watching it in under 15 minutes or so. With my ATV2, I have to wait at least 1 hour to start watching an SD movie. Of course, we will never rent an HD movie on the ATV2 - tried that once - 61 hours for load time.

The second issue deals with restarting a current rent. We rented a movie tonight and let it take 55 minutes to load before we could start watching it. I assumed that if I stopped it for a few minutes (I needed to change an audio setting in the menu), that I could restart the movie without it having to totally reload. No deal. We had to wait another hour for reload. This seems like a simple software update fix. Anyone know if they are working on this?

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