Home Sharing drop out with Apple TV2

Apple TV 2 keeps dropping the wireless connection. Will play iTunes and iPhoto content one moment, and drop connection next moment. I have to fiddle with it, restart everything to get it going again — EVERYDAY. Have latest Mac OS, iTunes, Apple TV software running on a MacBook Pro. Problem may have started with latest Mac OS update. Before this, it seems the only problem I had was with Netflix streaming.

I've been having the same problem the last few weeks. Movies used to work. Last week homesharing dropped and I had to request a refund for a rental. Now my music drops after 10 or 15 minutes.

I have gone from loving this product to hating it. My Apple TV 2 has become a useless piece of junk. Why doesn't Apple fix this??? It is clearly a problem thousands of people are having. Are they just in denial? Has anyone found a solution?

And yes, I have the latest versions of Itunes and Apple tv firmware.

went into an apple retailer and he agreed it was **** that the atv2 isn't more robust. but he said unless you're running all apple gear, apple can't be held responsible for incompatabilities. he has a point.

a totally different retailer pointed out that while there are definitely people with atv2 problems, there will be thousands who are having no problems. this doesnt fix our problems i know, but i'm not about to write off apple.

and i know the frustration (until i went ethernet cable atv2-router & macbook-router). now my atv2 suddenly seems bulletproof. like night and day. all i got now is the flicker of the screen. but i'm counting myself lucky.

updates to come will surely address it all. hang in there guys.

Good point except that I've problems since the first update, and every computer/smart device in our house is made by Apple.

The original post in this thread was on 9 March. It is now 6 June and we all continue to suffer from home sharing dropping out. I want to stream music to my stereo via an ATV2 and it is infuriating when it cuts out for no reason at all. Whether I stream from iTunes 4.2.2 on a Windows 7 computer or the iPod app on my iPhone 3GS, makes no difference--the same thing happens: the connection breaks.

Too many people out there are having the problem; if Apple is aware of it, some indication that they are working to resolve it would be kind.

Same here ... very device in the house is Apple, including my Time Machine router, and I've had problems since the firmware update.

And this idea that we should go to ethernet to solve the problem is ridiculous ... we bought wireless to go wireless ... and it WAS working until they broke it!

So my beef here with this whole issue about compatability and unless you use apple products is a farce... What about standards? Why did apple try to break the wireless standards to get their products to work. This would/WILL become a bigger issue if all of a sudden they decide to change their product line to a new "Apple" wireless standard.

I proved to Apple that they were breaking standards on the wireless with my Cisco based network and that was based on network packet captures and errors that the ATV2 was doing on my "N" wireless network. It is clear that apple tried to optimize the ATV2 for speed and such but it is CLEARLY SEEN that Apple has F*'d up and they need to resort back to the original code on the ATV2 for their wireless component of the code. I guess that if you look at the majority of the population, airport is not the primary wireless system out there. 802.11 standards are. If Apple tries to go their own route, no one will buy their product.

What happens to everyone if OSX tried to go that route and you won't be able to use your macbook ot a wireless hotspot? APPLE GET IT RIGHT!!! USE STANDARDS!

I don't think it's necessarily a standards or compatibility issue. My Toshiba laptop works pretty well with the ATV2. It's my Mac Mini with OSX10.6.7 via either Airport Extreme or ethernet that I'm having the most trouble with.

My problems are with both an ASUS laptop running Windows 7 and an iPhone, and there are enough posts in this thread to suggest the problem is not an Apple/PC issue. It also seems to me that enough people with technical knowledge have done some decent diagnostic work all of which leads back to there having been a change after recent software updates which has caused the problem.

Is it too cynical to wonder whether Apple is about to make it all right by pushing us out into the cloud?

Received the 2nd gen Apple TV on May 24th. Hooked it up on May25th. Worked perfectly for a few days then the dropped connections started via wireless. It will take a long time to load itunes library or will tell me to turn on a computer with itunes home sharing on. My computer (PC running XP)is set to NEVER sleep and iTunes is open when the issues occur. At first I was resetting everything. I seem to have narrowed it down to just closing and reopening iTunes.

I'm a PC/Android guy but I purchased 2 iPads, an Apple TV 2nd Gen, and an iPod touch. The Apple TV was working perfectly for a few days. So well I was almost willing to drop my android phone and PC to get the iPhone and a Macbook Air. Not so much anymore.

-Karuk....The ALMOST Apple convert.

I have the same problem, Home Sharing lasts for about five minutes then disappears, BUT I found a weird quirk.

Using remote on my iphone and authorised as a device in itunes, I can use this to select media and play it to the ATV2 when the shared library has disappeared.

When the shared library disappears from the ATV2 iTunes on the PC can still see the ATV2 and send content to it. It is only the shared library bit that drops.

New theory -- the ATV2 wifi connection is (obviously) buggy, but it seems also that wifi does not fully-disable when ethernet is plugged in, which is why it doesn't seem to matter for people whether their units are wireless or not.

My (new) fix was to block the MAC address of my ATV2 on my AirPort network, forcing my ATV2 to have no choice but connect only via ethernet. So far, all my problems have disappeared, regardless of iTunes or OS version.

Here's what I did:

I have the ethernet and wifi MAC addresses of my ATV2 assigned static IP addresses by my DD-WRT router. I run my ATV2 plugged in to ethernet, and my ATV2 reports the correct DHCP IP address assigned to the ethernet port.

On my Mac mini serving up my music library, the ATV2 talks to my iTunes library as "Apple-TV.local", clearly using Bonjour networking to communicate on the network, as evidenced in Little Snitch's Network Monitor. My other computers appear as their static-assigned DNS name, which in this case would be "appletv-en1" if it were not a Bonjour connection. Fine.

So I ran Traceroute (in Applications > Utilities > Network Utility) to reverse-lookup what IP address my Mac thought was on the other end of "apple-tv.local", and it reported two IP addresses at that name.

I really don't think that is normal behavior for Bonjour, so I unplugged the ethernet cable to eliminate that IP address possibility and tested streaming via wifi only. It eventually dropped the connection to my library. So we know wifi is buggy.

I then wanted to try wired-only next, but there appears to be no way to definitively shut off wifi on Apple TV, so instead I blocked the MAC address from my wireless network using AirPort Utility. I just configured "Access Control" with the MAC address and set it to "No Access".

So far, it works. No drops. Naturally, this is bad for anyone who must use wireless, but I'm curious for those who can run wired if this might be something that works in your cases as well.

Message was edited by: balord, did you know you can't write the word that starts with 'S' and rhymes with 'ducks' on here?

It looks like Apple has finally released an iTunes update (10.3). I won't be able to test until I'm at home, but here's hoping it fixes the issue. It sure has been annoying.

Jim, I installed iTunes 10.3 on my PC yesterday and it has made no difference to the problems I've been experiencing with drop out.

I'm just trying the solution proposed by <balord> in the post above yours to see whether that gives any joy.

10.3 did not fix the problem for me. Still drops out after 5 minutes.