Apple TV is Downloading movie rentals very slowly

FWIW I have sent at least 3 feedback messages to apple, one for iTunes, two for ATV 3 all to no avail or at least they don't reply so who knows if Apple is paying any attention to the things. Nevertheless I would suggest others doing the same.

In the meantime, I think at least for now I have solved the problem on my system and will offer this as a suggestion for other to consider and perhaps experiment with.

We use an Airport Extreme in the house to feed both a Mac Mini as well as the ATV 3 via ethernet cables and wirelessly to other devices we have. Over the last few weeks and especially since acquiring the ATV we have noticed the connection speed via the AE to slow down considerably and have rebooted it several times with some improvement. I was to the point of believing the Extreme was going bad a couple of nights ago given its pathetic download speeds which were not much more than dial up or base DSL speeds. In frustration I shut it down and left it that way over night with all cables, ethernet, power etc unplugged. Started it back up the next day and its now screaming fast, in fact every bit as much as our cable modem direct and this is a first.

Last night was the acid test with the ATV 3, we streamed one TV show (@ 1 hour length), a dozen or more Trailers as well as several previews from the iTunes store and one full length feature film in 1080p. All went without a hitch with the buffer in graphics white running way out ahead of the actual stream. In fact the buffer for the 2 hour and 7 minute show completed about a quarter of the way through the film. Nothing seemed to slow the ATV stream down by any measure.

While I can't explain technically why shutting the AE down for this period of time apparently had some effect that simply rebooting with a 5-10 minute shut down did not there is no arguing with the apparent results. Using the AE wirelessly we can now consistently clock in at 32+ mbs going on two days now which we were never able to do previously. Presumably the introduction of the ATV 3 created a path initially that was getting hung up in cyberspace routing through the Extreme. No idea why. But for those who have a similar setup its worth experimenting with this to see if it makes a difference.

Hope this helps.

Just a quick follow up regarding my previous post above. Its going on over a full week now and we have streamed several movies and tv shows, dozens and dozens of trailers, preview et al with all very fast connection. No stalls, balks, hiccups what so ever even during prime time server demand. At this point I am willing to go out on a limb and declare that somehow the ATV 3 did in fact introduce some sort of internal routing terminal dead spot and the way to eliminate this is to disconnect and turn off devices for a period of time.

Hopefully others have solved or rectified their slow issues with the ATV.

Ok, so I unplugged by time capsule overnight and then plugged it back in this morning. Went to my ATV3 and tried to play a movie a purchased and it played right up! Never happened before, always the "it will take 2 hours to load" message. Why this worked I don't know but it worked!

Thanks routlaw!

Im in Sydney Australia. Same thing here. Stalls after the first 5 minutes or so. Ive tried rebooting etc but no difference. Ongoing for a few weeks now. Ive given up and now use my TV or X-Box to download. Worthless junk Apple. Where do I get a refund for those unwatchable movies.....?

Hey guys. I can't even believe I'm posting this, but it worked. I had tried everything from changing DNS, plugging into ethernet, a full reset of the ATV, etc. What I did was unplug my ATV for a full day then plug it back in, and now it works gloriously. Totally mysterious, but whatever.

I had major problems downloading using AppleTV. I am on Sasktel with 25Mbps and I was running into five days until it is ready to watch. I contacted both sasktel support and iTunes support multiple times and nobody could figure out what the problem was they each said it was the other. I took my AppleTV to my parents house hooked it up and was able to download no problem minimal delay in their provider was Shaw. I called sasktel back with this information and talk to multiple tiers of support; eventually I was on the line listening to the hard-core tech guys talking back and forth and they resolved the problem. it turned out to be firmware on my 2wire Gateway, it was limiting the file size of downloads; basically it was throttlling any file over 2GB. They were able to reflash my modem with the old firmware and it corrected the issue. This was the discovery of an issue for them and 2wire and it was also solved in the next firmware version.

haha, yeah apple defenders have blinkers. how can sooooooooo many complain and apple ppl don't know, come on guys get real

This is a user forum. It's a small group compared to the total users and a lot of issues can come down to the network

vazandrew

if the forums are an indication it is a widespread problem. what you are saying is crap, obre Los ojos

Not at all. It is not widespread as the majority of users are not experiencing it. If you would rather rant than troubleshoot do it elsewhere

and youre an authority of how many people are complaining? If you google any of the myriad networking and video streaming issues on apple products it is a pretty good indicator.

by the way, my high speed LAN is greater than 25mbps, my line speed is 157mbps, my download speed is >20mbps.

All 4 computers in the LAN have no problems with networking or video streaming, only Apple products. The 3rd gen appletv will not download anything at all.

I work in IT and any networking issue can be fixed. With apple there are no solutions client side. You can see this on these forums - there are no solutions or workarounds. So why don't you vazandrew spend more time looking for solutions instead of wasting your energy with your position as an apple defender?

Same issue tonight trying to rent The Dark Knight Rises in HD via ATV3. ETA to watch movie was around 50 hours. unfortunately i started watching movie and it froze after a couple minutes, so now i only have 20 hours remaining. Im in Los Angeles, using Time Warner cable, and experienced download rates of 8 - 20 mb/s. tried restarting download and rebooting modem several times with no success. Ended up just streaming a movie on NetFlix instead. Will contact customer support tomorrow and hopefully get my money back.

I was having the same issue with long download times (3 days) just installed my ATV this week.

Spoke to Apple and they sent me a list of ports that need to be open on My router.

Once I called my ISP (AT&T) they turned on the ports for my iPad and ATV and I was able to download a movie on the spot!

You would be doing us a great kindness if you could tell us which ports those were!

Of course, here is the link that they emailed me.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2463

These network ports are used by Apple TV for communications on your network.

TCP port 123 is used to communicate with a network time server.

TCP port 3689 is used to communicate with iTunes while using the iTunes Library Sharing feature.

UDP port 5353 is used by Apple TV for automatically finding computers with iTunes on your network using Bonjour.

TCP port 80 is used for communicating with podcast servers.

TCP port 80 and 443 are used for basic and secure communications with the iTunes Store via the Internet.

TCP port 53 is used for regular DNS.

These are well-known ports used by Apple products, like iTunes. If you can use all the features of iTunes, these ports are likely already open on your firewall or NAT router. Note: These ports may also used by other services such as YouTube and Flickr.

Hope this helps everyone from not throwing their ATV in the trash can! LOL