Home Sharing drop out with Apple TV2

I was one of the guys who reported that ATV3 worked fine for weeks after turning off IPV6.

However, yesterday the problems occoured again.. and every 20 minutes my movie watching got interrupted.

I did notice something, and that is that my iPhone uses wifi connection in my house, and I tried to turn it off, as ATV3 has this airplay function.

After I turned off wifi on iphone, I watched my movie to the end, the last 20-30 minutes without break, and it got too late to test anything more.

IPV6 is still turned off on my Win7 with itunes. ATV3 is on cabled network to the router with wifi hotspot.

I will test this further tonight, start a movie and see how long it lasts with iphone wifi turned off.

anyone else seen this ?

Just an update. I spent some time on the phone with support and the guy didn't have a clue what was wrong so he sent the information to engineering. A few days later I called back and the support person said something to this effect "Development has gotten a few of these complaints, they are looking into it, there's no known workaround other than stopping ans starting iTunes, and we do not have an estimated fix time, just keep looking for iTunes and other iOS device update". Pretty vauge but I'm not suprised by their reply.

My problem is different than some others here. My iTunes streams fine to all my iOS devices until there has been a lapse of a few hours of no streaming, then I cannot start a stream at all on any device until I stop/start iTunes. Much diffferent problem than others streams cutting out when streaming. That has NEVER happened to me.

Sad news but I'm hoping that this means Apple knows there's a problem and will try and do something about it.

The one last hope I need to try is a different router but I don't know why this would change my situation. If it does I'll let everyone know.

Guess what!

Bought my ATV about a month ago and was working perfectly fine until a week ago where now ATV rarely recognises iTunes and when it does it works for about 5 minutes and quits out to not recognising it. I run iTunes from an iMac.

Restarting iTunes sometimes works.

Whether coincidence or not, this happened the day I switched to a new router.

One thing I did notice is that on one occassion, the moment my iphone started wifi syncing with the iMac, home sharing quit out on the ATV.

Could this be some sort of IP conflict that the new router is causing... ?

I have...

ATV 2

ATV 3

iMac

Airport Extreme

Worked fine for years....then there was an update to iTunes and ATV.

Now unless I prevent the ATVs from sleeping Home Sharing fails after a period of inactivity. To fix I have to reboot iTunes a few times and turn Home Sharing off and on a few times..

This, together with several persistent iOS5 bugs I have and like this topic, have received tens of thousands of hits and have not been fixed by Apple, just goes to prove the phrase "It just works" is sadly a thing of the past.

Iburchett, I had the same problem. You can get a micro usb cable and connect your appletv to a computer that is running iTunes. From there you can restore factory defaults.

That might work. If it doesnt go to an apple store and exchange your apple tv. That is what I did. My apple tv has been working properly for weeks.

I'm another ATV2 owner with the same movie drop-out issue since the software update that we all downloaded and are now stuck with. I thought I'd ad another "fix this, Apple" comment to this ever-increasing list of complaints....cheers everyone.

My apple tv2 worked fine until I accidentally updated software. Well, my girlfriend did.

After screaming: NO, NO, NO I found out that home share went to ****. It would work for five minutes and
then i would need to restart itunes to continue watching movies. Just wanted to brake the **** thing because I
tried every possible trick that i have found on the internet...

Anyway, if you want to watch movies without drop out: play the movie in itunes, click on the little icon to share on apple tv and it will work fine. Every time. Hope this helps until apple comes out with another software update.

I figured out a workaround to my problem. Setting all four AppleTVs to not sleep fixed the problem. I didn't try this earlier because I also have iPhones and iPads that would also not connect to home sharing. Something in ATV is causing home sharing on all devices to fail.

So in short if you are having any trouble with home sharing on any device turn off sleep on all your ATVs.

I streamed audio via a nice free little utility called Airfoil (using a DJ App) from the same Macbook as I have my iTunes library on to the Apple TV for hours on end, uninteruppted this weekend.

Netflix, YouTube, rented movies all perfectly fine on ATV too.

This is a problem with iTunes, I'm convinced. How can it not be when everything else works? Router problems and settings is just a cop out.

If Airplay works fine from iTunes, though - it would seem that Home Sharing functionality has been compromised in later iTunes updates. Just to repeat what I've said before: Home Sharing is not mentioned once on the Apple Store info about Apple TV. Airplay, Netflix etc are mentioned straight away

This cannot be a coincidence. Apple have quietly dropped Home Sharing without telling anyone. Obviously, this is a controversial move for people like myself who bought Apple TV because of Home Sharing. No wonder they are afraid to come clean.

What is happening to Apple? First Lion and now this. I think that the quality decline is well underway.

DP06 - thanks for the tip on the TCP and UDP ports and for providing the links and port#'s too! Same exact issue, followed your advice on opening them up in my wireless router and Homesharing works great now. I was experiencing a disconnect from homesharing on ATV2 after the upgrades. I found that I could play a song or two via ATV2 then it disconnected. I had to log off of homeshare then back on via the PC. Frustrated, found your advice, in a matter of a few minutes had it fixed and have tested it for 2 hours now (iTunes via ATV2).

Thank you!!

Apple don't pay any attention to these fora. We need to use the http://www.apple.com/feedback/

facility to let them know about this.

Below is the post that I have formally made on their feedback site. It is generic to most of our problems, so please feel free to copy and pate it to the link above. Perhaps then they might take notice and sort this out!

___________________________________________

Wi Fi Home sharing has stopped working in recent weeks for myself, and judging by your own forums, a great number of Apple TV owners worldwide.

All other wireless functions of Apple TV (Rentals, Netflix, YouTube etc) work perfectly. As do all other iTunes connectivity functions (store, rentals on Mac etc). It is purely that Home Sharing drops out every few minutes between iTunes and the Apple TV. This started after recent updates to iTunes and Apple TV.

Obviously, if my system worked flawlessly until recently, and it still works for all other features as outlined above, then something must have gone wrong with Apple's Home Sharing since the recent updates.

I notice that all mention of Home Sharing has been dropped from the Apple TV section of the online Store. I can only conclude that Apple have quietly stooped support for Home Sharing. Given that this was the main reason for my original purchase of this device, and that I have paid for a great deal of content at Apple's iTunes store in order to make use of this functionality, it stands to reason that Apple have a responsibility to swiftly resolve this issue and restore Home Sharing to its previous functionality.

Apple haven't dropped Home Sharing. There's clearly a bug with no known workaround, but the feature hasn't been dropped.

One thing to try is to update the firmware on any Apple Airport devices you may have. Prior to doing this, I had very slow downloads and frequent drops from iTunes to my Apple TV and frequent drops from any of my Mac devices to the Apple TV via Home Share. Updating the Apple TV to the latest software and updating the firmware on all my Airport Express devices corrected the problems so far.

It has for Apple TV. Hence no mention on Apple's store.

@beatmunga For me telling all of my AppleTVs not to go to sleep allowed Home Sharing to work flawlessly to all my iOS devices. This is a workaround but not a fix.

Also there's a new AppleTV software update (just checked), Everyone should try it out and see if it helps.