Q: I have to restart iTunes every day to access my home sharing on my Apple tv

Im going to toss this out for the issue: Homesharing drops out on windows 7 machine.

Purchased a Apple TV last week and discovered that homeshare very shaky and drops out over several minutes.

Have all the same issues seen here in the forum.

WIndows 7 machine has my entire Itunes library have latest and greatest every thing.

Hardware is a cisco E1550 multicast filter is off and all ports are good.

Saw 1 suggestion that newest bonjour print service was bombing out connection so deleted from windows machine and installed an earlier version and had limited joy.Issue returns.

Did diagnostic on ATV and ran software check and have latest! Speed test is good, 40mbps.

So issue is with windows machine.

using 64 bit bus.

I have had the same problem through the past few years, but it has gotten MUCH better.   I have 6 apple tv devices throughout the house running off a Mac Pro, through a Apple Airport Extreme Router.  All the apple TVs(latest gen), access the network over the wireless network.  

Scenerio:

     - Mac Pro running itunes with about 50+ movies (growing each month)

     - Airport extreme router.

     - 6 apple tv device all on wireless network.

     - Home sharing enabled (obviously)

     - Never reboot my Mac (unless update requires it).

I now have gone up to two months at times with out any issues on any apple tv.  When I get that annoying "Home Sharing Error" on apple TV, I restart itunes and it goes away.

I used to run off a Window XP machine and the problem happend all the time.  I also used a Linksys router before as well.  I had the problem all the time back then (about 8 months ago).  I'm not sure home much of the solution was the going All Apple, or was it updates Apple made to the Apple Tv / iTunes software.

One thing that helped for sure was disabling anything on the Mac or Windows Server that would put the machine to sleep.  I don't think parking the drives was an issue, but system needs to wake up if any network traffic is received.

Like I said, much better today than a year ago, but I still get the wife yelling up from the basement every now and then "The Apple Tv is not working.... Can you fix it?"..   I won't complain to much though.  What a GREAT setup for $79 to $99 per tv...  We love it.

I'm willing to bet it's the combination of a Windows PC and an Apple router.  I switched from a Cisco Linksys to AirPort Extreme and had to switch back because I would have to restart iTunes after almost every video.  It works flawlessly on the Linksys without changing a thing from one to the other - I didn't even restart the PC.

I tried keeping iTunes open on a 2nd PC, but the problem persisted.  I also tried keeping the Apple TVs and the PC awake (the PC never sleeps anyway).  Even the remote app on iPhone would refuse to connect at times.

Windows 7 64bit

2 3rd gen Apple TVs

iPhone 5, 4S, 4, 3G, Original

3rd gen iPad, iPad mini

Everything is running with the latest updates (at least what's available for each device)

I've had exactly the same problem for months now, and it was so frustrating since I use my Apple TV daily. I've read hundreds of forums and tried numerous things to fix this problem - nothing ever helped me.

Now I did a PRAM-Reset (ctrl-alt-p-r on startup) to solve another issue - and now everything works like a charm. I don't say that this is the one and only way to fix this issue, but it's worth a try.

Good luck to all of you!

Sorry: cmd-alt-p-r

I hope someone at apple is monitoring. Very annoying having to restart iTunes EVERY day on my MacPro that stays on 7/24 running iTunes for my 4 ATVS. And yes, this only started after an iTunes update. It is definitely software related. We put up with enough ATV inadequacies to have to deal with this one as well.

If you are listening, sure would be nice to access a movie on my airport without having to keep the computer running all the time too!