Airplay and Home sharing are very slow

Had same problem. What worked for me was to enable a bandwidth control on the router's settings. I find out my internet speed and set the limit. I tested my speed via wifi at around 44mps. I then set the download/upload to around 10mbps and improved. Now it seems the bandwidth between devices is fairly distributed allowing better transmitting via airplay. You may need to experiment with different limit speeds to see which one would work best for you.

This is happening to me all of the sudden, home sharing is so laggy on the iPad 2/iPhone 4 but on atv2 it works perfectly? Any ideas?

I am having some massive issues with home sharing in terms of both speed and as I'm noticing now, playing video almost at all from home sharing on an iPad.

Here are some interesting aspects that I find interesting, and might be a clue as to fix it:

One computer, an iMac with a large library (around 120 gigs), has trouble playing (basically everything is too slow to the point of being impossible to play -- I did get a very low res podcast to work, but it even struggles with bare audio) home shared content from a labtop, trouble sending things through AirPlay, things play too slowly on a 2ns gen Apple TV and on iPad/iPod Touch.

Another computer, a labtop with a moderate library (around 20 gigs) has almost none of the speed issues (or at least not worth complaining about in comparison) present playing on the AppleTV, the iPad or the iPhone. However, playing movies on the iPad comes up with a "This movie could not be played" -- this is a movie purchased from iTunes. It does play video podcasts, well enough I suppose, but then I cannot enter my labtop's library from the iPod App any longer without turning the iPad off and starting fresh. The name of the library shows, but it won't bring up a loading dial (or do anything at all) when touching it.

The iPad can use it's AirPlay functions with Apple TV and it's got mostly the same content as the iMac. Videos bought from iTunes check out fine. This is without Home Sharing however.

Some fiddling in vain:

- I had tried refreshing the iTunes library, but go no results, so I restored the previous files.

- I also increased the multicast rate from 2.2 to 11 in Airport Utility, but noticed negligble impact and selected 5 in the end as 2 seemed overcautious in terms of range.

- I've connected Airport by ethernet cable... which did improve some loading issues (such as the library not being accessible), but video playback/buffering did not improve. After connecting it by cable it seems I can unplug it and use Wifi just fine to access the library, but not a real solution there other than a free cable. Very strange all the same.

- I have my router (AirPort Extreme) set to bridge mode, but I can't see an issue there, as the Labtop's home sharing works fine by Wifi.

... so yeah, I'm really pulling at straws here, but I really would just like the iMac to be able to work well with the Apple TV (2) as it's the main library. Recommendations are welcome, as always.

I have a similar problem and am hoping to find an answer. I am running itunes on a mac mini, hardwired to the current Airport Extreme (802.11n), yet when I Home Share to either my iPhone 4 or iPad 2, it takes about 10mins to load the library on each device! Of course if I leave the home sharing or open another app and come back, I have to go through the process again. Is there a way to save the cached library on my devices? Is this how slow iCloud will be? On the iPad it is just as slow with Music and Videos. I have about 160 Gig worth of music and about 1.4 TB in vie (tv and movie), ripped DVD collection. I would LOVE some guidance as to how to have a seamless interaction with this content over my wifi.. Thanks!

I'm hoping someone comes up with an answer as well. I am having the same issues with my ATV while trying to use airplay, it "will not" play a single song without stopping. For those who insist it is a network issue consider that I have no issue at all with streaming my library over my apple tv only airplay. It's the same library from the same macbook and streaming works and airplay does not (makes me want to send the ATV through the wall... it makes no sense).

I'd just like to update my situation, with good news fortunately.

I'm not sure what exactly did it (I'm guessing one of the recent updates to the Apple Tv or iTunes) but the iMac is now streaming with perfectly acceptable performance. Snappy and quick-loading as I should have expected in the first place, it's nice to finally be able to use my Apple Tv as designed.