Apple TV Drops from Home Sharing

I had update so now it's 2 hours atv 3 work without lost connection from iMac

I will try working it all night and tomorrow I'll write if ok

I hope all goes fine

Sorry for my English

Ciao from italy

Yes work all night no disconnect

My home sharing connection drops regularly (usually overnight) - as per other comments in this thread the problem is "solved" by restarting Itunes on the relevant computer although this is obviously an irritation. I have the latest Apple TV (1080p etc.)

I applied the 5.0.1 update last night and I lost my connection overnight.

I have never had a situation where the connection drops during use i.e. if I'm watching a movie it always finishes the movie so the problem seems to occur during the time that the Apple TV is in sleep mode. My computer never goes to sleep so I don't think the problem is with the computer - also I have many Mac's in the house and they all experience the problem.

I have never experienced this problem with home sharing on the many Mac's in my house or on Ipad or Iphone so it seems to be something related specifically to the Apple TV.

Can anyone else confirm that the problem still occurs with 5.0.1?

I had the same problem with my Apple TV2 and iTunes on Windows 7, after 10 minutes watching something on the Apple TV it would then cut and say Home Sharing not connected and I would have to go and disable it through iTunes and then re-enable it.

After lots of searching I found there was a problem with Bonjour so uninstalled it in control panel/programs then restarted computer and reinstalled Bonjour from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL999 (it's named Bonjour Print Services for Windows v2.0.2).

After reinstalling it all has been fine and Apple TV works fine and have had no problems!

TJ.

Same problem here. Two Macs and one aTV on wired network. All have latest Lion OS and iTunes. ATV 5.01. Have to restart iTunes to get it working again. Can't access computers through aTV or directly with IOs Remote.

I've had this problem since the beginning eve before Home Sharing, where iTunes and the Apple TVs don't always connect, usually losing the link over night or so it appears. Two Gen1s, one Gen2 and one Gen3. Very annoying having to always quit and restart iTunes. My iTunes Mac never Sleeps.

So I don't know if anyone'll read this, but here's how I apparently solved the home sharing issue for me. If you're like me then you've got all yor movies and music on external hard drives...make sure those are shared with your network. Right click on the drive, go to properties, follow the instructions to make it shared. Simplistic? Maybe, but it seems to work for me so far. Also the remote app seems to work easier to. I don't know why this is all so complicated, all I want to do is watch a movie for cripe's sake.

Hi Folks,

I was one of the early contributors to this thread.

I have an iMac, 2 aTV's (gen2) and was having huge issues with the last update to both itunes and the aTV seeming to kill the functionality of home sharing. It was all running on one wifi network.

I have made the following changes to my set up.

I have now used my router to create a wifi network that all non apple devices use (work laptops, xbox, visitors etc), i then have my time capsule hard wired into the router but broadcasting a apple wifi, at both 2.4 & 5 frequencies, i use this wifi for only the apple equipment in the house and so far my home sharing has been running problem free since this change.

I have waited a good 3-4 weeks to test this before commenting back.

I don't know if this will work for everybody but it has cured my issues stone dead.

I made no advanced setup changes to anything either went with bog standard settings.

Hope it helps

Not sure if my issue had to do with the upgrade, but Home Sharing no longer shows up. Appraently it is asking for an OLD email address and password, but I have a new account and password. Not sure how to get rid of the old one to activate ihome sharing. Was working fine before the upgrade and new account info. Is there a way to deactivate an acount? The screen is insisting I active home shartng using the old accout info

Hi all

My story so far...

I have always had a flaky Home Sharing experience with an iTunes library on an iMac, an ATV 3 and remote running on an iPhone 4 and an iPad "3". The ATV frequently lost the connection to my iMac. Oddly, AirPlay from the iMac to the ATV had always been pretty good and I don't remember any problem with Remote or indeed the Music app on iPhone or iPad.

I recently bought a new Billion 7300N router to replace the dreadful (hah!) BT Homehub 2 and things seemed to be worse, with Remote in particular becoming totally useless on the iPad (I think it's not the same code base on the iPhone or iPad as there's a bug affecting one but not the other) and Music not working on either the iPad or iPhone.

Despite what others have suggested I feel this is an Apple software problem and nothing to do with the router, mainly as evidenced by the fact it has always been bad even on the old router and no one has been able to definitely say what they have done with a Billion router to correct the problem. It's even more confused now as I've seen several Apple software updates happening around the same time as my hardware change, to iTunes and ATV, and I don't use the Home Sharing/AirPlay features often enough to really notice a particular update causing the problem...

Anyway, I've turned off IPv6 ('networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi' in Terminal), turned off the Mac firewall and removed iTunes plist files. Weirdly things seemed momentarily better with both ATV and iTunes coming up in the iPhone Remote, but not in iPad Remote. Minutes later I'm back to having remote control of ATV from the iPhone but not from iPad, my iTunes library cannot be found by Remote or Music on either iPhone or iPad and ATV is not connecting to my iTunes library. Also I can no longer AirPlay from the iMac to ATV, although I can from my iPhone!

I haven't done any of the port forwarding because I can't find instructions on how to do this on my router and it's all too complicated for me. Sounds rubbish I know, I'm actually technically very competent, but this is too much! If anyone is happy to babysit me through trying it out, I'll give it a go but from other's comments I'm not confident it will work.

In summary: I think Home Sharing has been the lowest of the low points in terms of Apple features ever rolled out. My line of work means I'm very aware of Apple's recent developments and I'm often heard saying RIP Steve Jobs. This system simply cannot be that hard to get working properly...

Really appreciate the community effort here though 🙂 Fingers crossed it will work out soon.

pd

I'm having this problem too. For me, it seems like my iMac (27" quad core, 1yr old) keeps dropping the WiFi connection. I can hit the menu bar extra and reconnect to my network no problem. When I do, the AppleTV springs to life and I'm ok. The machine is set to never sleep (so the Apple TV can find it), but sleep the display and spin down the hard drives. I'm going to just run an ethernet cable from the iMac to the AirPort base station and turn off WIFi and see if that helps. Bummer, cuz' it's nice to have wireless everything. Crosses fingers...

I have the same issue where neither of my Apple TV2 work on home sharing after the OS upgrade. All other internet related services work. I opened a paid ticket yesterday with Apple Care and after an hour they blammed it on my router (Netgear WND3400). So, I removed the Netgear router and replaced it with a Linksys router. Some issue! I've tried it with my Eset firewall disabled with no luck. I also manually added the TCP and UDP ports. No luck! This must be a software issue, however Apple will not agree!

Does anyone having these problems have a VM (VmWare, VirtualBox etc) installed on the machine where they are running iTunes.

I was running into intermittent issues with my AppleTV connecting to iTunes after installing VirtualBox on my iTunes server. These issues were resolved by disabling the "VirtualBox Host-Only Network) controller on the PC. I haven't worked out how to reolve the issue so I can use both VirtualBox and get the AppleTV to connect to iTunes.

If you're having connection issues try disabling any virtual network adapters on the PC to see if it helps.

Same problem here. I just got a new Apple TV and I hate the piece of junk compared to my trusty old version that still works just fine...

I really don't like how everything has to stream now and you can't tell the Apple TV through iTunes which files that you wish to keep on the device. At least when that was possible, you would know that when you wanted to watch your TV show or movie it was definitely there and would work.

Now, with this $100 doorstop I have to rely on it's sh***y networking to watch anything at all. I really do not like paying for both the hardware and the content and not being able to watch it when I want!!!!!!

Ok, this is an encouraging test. After multiple upgrades, updates, network changes, all to no avail, this seems to narrow the problem.

I created a new user on my Mac and started iTunes from scratch. I loaded all my video, podcast and music (without moving or copying), enabled home sharing with the same AppleID i use on my main user at the mac.

Both ATV 3 immediately saw the new library, not a surprise so far. After two days, while both libraries (each belonging to a user in the mac) are seen, but my original one keeps the spinning wheel "loading XXX library", while the new one starts right away. So the problem disappeared using the same version of iTunes and a newly created library.

This would be great except I have several iPads, iPhones and the likes synched with my old library under my regular userid.

The problem seems to be in some corruption at the iTunes level, either the .plists or the library (a bunch of XML files) level.

I would like to know how can I recreate or cleanup this library, without loosing my podcast subscriptions, and my entries.

Maybe this can help point to a very upsetting problem. My old library suffered many iTunes updates and there might be the cause. It is very large library (more than 25,000 entries among all types of media).

Hope this helps...