Apple TV displaying the spinning buffering wheel while playing movies!?

I have the same problem and this is what I sent to there support Email "First gen Apple Tv, rent movies all the time, but last night when I rented a movie the screen goes to "Accessing ITunes Store" with a meatball spinning. That's as far as it went never did that before it would normaly switch to the rental screen and show the percentage downloaded. As my only way to check what might be wrong I went to my Mac book pro and rented a movie an it went without a hitch. Also on the Apple tv I was and I'm still able to use the internet radioand YouTube."
you can't talk with a real person because I bought the Apple TV over a year ago. if you figure out the issue please let me know.
rich

Lucanaut wrote:
Yeah in mine everything plays...with the spinning wheel in front, so really, it's kind of unacceptable.

tried a factory restore ?

the second generation appletv does not support iTunes Extras.

Lucanaut wrote:
I know, that's why in my original post I specified that it's the original ATV

so why post in the forum for the second generation appletv then ?

I went pretty crazy and wrote a number of posts about ATV2 problems. I ended up spending a 100$ I didn't have on a high speed switch so I could hardwire my ATV2 to my Airport Extreme Router. Now, it works properly 9 times out of 10, leaving me generally satisfied, but still realizing there is probably some contributing problem out there in Apple cyberspace. There was an interesting sidelight, though, and I am hoping that a serious techie out there can address this for me and tell me if there could be a problem with my Airport Extreme, Airport Extremes in general, or something that is just characteristic of wireless communication in general. It might have a point of reference for many other posters.
At first I was upset because I was getting those "Ready to play in 2-6 hour messages" even though my Internet connection constantly tested at 15-20 Mbps on my iMac at numerous sites, not fast enough to set fire to my house, but certainly fast enough to avoid these messages. Then I did something I should have done first, I downloaded a Speed Test for my iPad so that I could check what kind of speeds were actually being received by my IPad at the same exact distance from the router as my Apple TV2. What I found was insane fluctuation. I did tests every 30 sec. for a half an hour. What I discovered was that my download connect speeds were changing radically every single time I tested it, going back and forth from speeds as fast as 16 Mbps to as slow as 1 Mbps. That undoubtedly had to have raised havoc with Apple TV's ability to download the movie. Since the speeds on my iMac were constant, something was happening to the signals that left my router. Is this a common wireless router problem, a common Airport Extreme problem, or a problem with my specific router? Techies out there might be able to tell us if such fluctuations in speed for those who connect wirelessly might in part contribute to the problems that caused all these threads.