Home Sharing drop out with Apple TV2

AppleTV simply has serious issues when trying to connect to a Homeshared iTunes library on my Mac. It only intermittently connects and allows me to play videos. Currently it can't even connect to iTunes despite Home Sharing being activated on both AppleTV and iTunes.

Note that Home Sharing works fine when connecting an iPhone or iPad to iTunes. This means there is a serious software or hardware bug in AppleTV itself despite it being also an iOS device.

My current solution is to install Air Video on my iPad and install Air Video server on the Mac. This allows my iPad to browse any of the disks attached to my Mac and play videos from them. The videos can then by Airplayed on the AppleTV. This is a very reliable setup. For MP4 or H264 video, the video can be passed through to the AppleTV at full resolution. It can even convert AVI files and other formats on the fly for showing on AppleTV. This solution works spectacularly. I can still use the AppleTV remote to control the video. It makes AppleTV useful again.

Well its happened again. I have upgraded to iTunes 11 last week and there are problems with home sharing. I restart my AppleTV2 then play a song from a playlist, then when the song is finished the connection to home sharing is lost. I then have to restart the AppleTV2 and choose the next song. This takes a long time if you want to listen to an album. I have to reset my ATV2 every time it has been in sleep mode. It will stream a film, but when finished loses the connection until it is reset again. I'm really sick and tired of Apple now. When I upgraded to iTunes10 there was also a problem with Atv2 streaming and it took over 3 months for them to sort it out. Sometimes their support is just not good enough.

Since i upgraded my ATv2 to the latest firmware i cannot use airplay with my iPad 3rd gen. but i can stream using airplay with my iPhone 4S strange!

Kind regards

Apple TV (2nd generation), iOS 5.1.1

Kind regards

Wrote an e-mail to Tim Cook last Thursday 30.02.13 explaining the situation. You'll never guess what happened next.

Yesterday I got a phone call ( no not from Tim) from Apple in Ireland and they connected me with an Apple senior engineer, with whom I spent nearly 45 minutes talking to. He tried lots of tests to no avail. He even listened to songs over the telephone to here when it lost the connection. By the way if you restart the Atv2 you also get the Home sharing connection back. He tried AirPlay and that worked perfectly.

In the end he said that he will investigate further and then ring to me at 10:00 am today the 5.02.13. He also said that it was highly improbable that it was a network issue and that it was most probably a software problem.

That's what I call service, and they have ensured me that it wont cost me a single penny, the service is gratis/without payment.

I am just waiting for him to ring.

Kind regards

The apple technician is still trying to sort the problem out. There has now gone 3 days and he has been checking the network settings. After our session today, he is going to discuss the problem with his colleges and then get back to me tomorrow. The last thing he said was that to him the problem seemed to be with iTunes server. He works through everything thoroughly time is no problem to him he said he is only interested in sorting the problem out.

I will post an update later.

Kind regards

I have a quick question that I hope someone can help me with. If I need to post on a different thread please let me know.

I have an ATV2 and an iMac. I live in an apartment complex that offers free wifi which I have been using on both devices with no problem. I have lived here for 6 months and during those months I discovered I could not share my iTunes library from my mac to my ATV via wifi for whatever reason (I guess because it's a public network, I really have no idea). I solved this by plugging an ethernet cable directly from my mac to the ATV and the problem was solved. This provided me with my library on my ATV and if I ever wanted to access the internet I could unplug the ethernet cable and logon to the apartment wifi with the ATV and it would work. I was fine with this setup but recently because of an update I can no longer share my itunes library via ethernet cable. I'm not sure if anything changed on one machine or the other but I would appreciate any suggestions from someone who knows more than me.

My apple tv is model MC572LL/A and has the 5.2 update

My mac is a 21.5" iMac with OS X 10.8.2

Thanks guys for your help

My theory (as a software engineer) is that the apple tv isn't broadcasting its location via bonjour frequently enough.

The server talking to the apple tv caches this information so it can find the apple tv. That entry expires after a certain period of time. If the apple tv isn't broadcasting its location often enough, the sender eventually can't find it.

That's based on the apple tv re-appearing if I restart it, or if I turn airplay off and back on again. It will re-appear for a period after that - which I'm theorizing is due to that processing forcing it to re-broadcast its location.

Maybe you could ask the apple technician if that is a possibility.

Did you get an answer to your question, cnellis2?

The ATV2 seems to have had connection problems since its release and no one solution has worked for anyone. I had problems, but by connecting the ATV2 to my modem/router via ethernet cable have avoided them completly. For others this has not worked.

Over the past week or so a new update for iOS appeared. Since then I have had connection problems even over the ethernet. My computer has always been connected to the router via wireless.

Sundancer's posts offer some hope that the problem is being looked at by Apple, although since there has been no public acknowledgement that it exists it is possible that it, in Apple's corporate mind, it doesn't.

For curiousity's sake, I'll report on another problem I found recently.

To extend the range of my wifi network, I connected another WAP via ethernet cable in a different part of the house. I gave it the same SSID and password. I found that, while the Apple remote app on my iPhone would work perfectly while connected to the primary modem/router, it would work once on the secondary WAP and then refuse to connect. No other device or application had a problem.

As is the case with all 58 pages of this saga, go figure.

By the way, Sundancer, well done on your efforts. We all look forward to further reports.

Cheers

This must be an issue between ATV and iTunes as I can stream from my win 7 PC to iPad an iPhone no problem, I can then stream onto the TV via the ATV. I can also stream AVIs to iPad using VLC Streamer and again onto TV via ATV. I have also tried to stream from iTunes on a laptop and get better results but it still drops out at various points.

Given the other posts about wired Ethernet connections then I doubt it's a wireless adapter issues, but restarting iTunes and/or ATV seems to improve for a while.

Also I've never had a problem streaming music from iTunes direct to ATV, so completely bemused and really fed up

I've only had the ATV3 for a week now and read all the post and cannot believe Apple are not dealing with this issue, as it is clearly happening to most people

Come on Apple, sort this out!!!

Last night I powered down my iMac and I got a message "AppleTV is still connected to iTunes, are you sure you want to continue" or similar. But I already had put my ATV to sleep and this is the first time I get this warning. Anyone else experienced this too?

I'm asking this because after I updated the FW of the ATV to 5.2, things seemed to have improved.

@Sandancer any update?

This is easily one of the most talked about apple product issues just now, but strangely its also one of the most ignored.

I've just went out and bought an 8m Ethernet cable to test if wired works and I have noticed two things so far.

1. Despite a good connection and no nearby interference wired is a lot snappier going though the menus

2. Wired has no issues that I can see

Is seems to be the wifi on the ATV that's causing the issue

Quick update.

wired connection has been rock solid for me. I've even been checking that the airplay icon is on my phone for both photos and the ipod app - it's been missing once, but only for 30secs or so - the rest of the time it's been spot on.

Unfortunately wired isn't an option for me (had to but an ethernet cable especially to try this out), so it's definitely an issue with the ATV wireless and not a user config issue.

I really hope that apple sort this out. It's stopping me getting another ATV for another room (which again would need to be wireless because of the location of the router)

Its an added cost but I utilize Netgear Powerline products to use my home electrical wiring for Ethernet. Speeds range from 85Mb to 500Mb per second. Works great. Great option if you want ethernet speeds and can't run ethernet cable.

I posted this elsewhere, but this might help this thread

I have the issue regarding ATV3 where everything works fine - streaming purchased movies from iTunes, streaming YouTube videos, using airplay to stream to ATV from iphone 4s and ipad 2with no issue, but when I try to play movies from my windows PC running the latest iTunes and home sharing then it plays about 2 seconds and then I get either the "turn on home sharing", or "unable to connect to network" message.

So I tried using my iPad running "remote" and went into my library on the PC and play the movie that way and that worked fine, I then streamed that over to my ATV and that worked too... So that was a workaround for me. Albeit more hassle! This also worked from my iPhone.

I also use VLC streamer to play avi movies on my iPad from the PC, and then use airplay to go to the ATV . It has a few glitches and restarts the movie after about an hour, but that is another way to get around the issue.

I then tried using a laptop with iTunes installed and home sharing and hey presto that worked playing exactly the same movies as on my main pc

The laptop has a built in wifi, and my PC has an external antenna TP-LINK TL-WN722N 150mbps via a USB port - but that works fine for everything else I do.

Router is a new BT hub 3.0 and I get 30mb download, so no issues there

Hope that helps someone

I had a similar issue as you did and I resolved the issue by doing the following:

As I have my entire Itunes Library on a 2 tb Windows 7 Machine using a cable modem attached to a new AppleExpress router, after many trial and errors it hit me that I'm using Windows 7 built in firewall along with the hardware firewall built into Airport Express. Seemed like Homeshare was being throttled down by 1 of 2 firewalls.

I simply turned off the Windows 7 firewall and have had no more issues with homeshare.