Apple TV - painfully slow buffering

I hate my Apple TV. I have purchased about 10 movies and when I go to watch them a second or third time they are still buffering. I have about 5 to 8MBs wi-fi and it told me 29hours for Hunger Games when I bought it over a month ago and have already watched it.. This system is HORRIBLE. Apple - please fix this SOON!!!

Same here it is terribly slow, completely unusable and am gutted. Come on release a fix please!!

I just got my ATV to work correctly no more buffering issues!

I reset my ATV and re-downloaded the latest update and re entered all my data and WOW it now works fine just like it did last year!

How did you reset it?

in the atv goto settings->general->reset this will force the ATV to download the os software again and then it worked for me.

...and I'm chiming in too. Bought my Apple TV a couple of weeks ago and... to be amazed and delighted after a surprisingly fluid movie experience on YouTube to crushing despair and frustration as anything on iTunes takes an age to load or buffers *constantly* (except the previews strangely enough)

I bought this device because I wanted the convenience of watching movies at my leisure and not have to go down the street to fight the hoardes in the DVD rental store. I reckon that might be my only option again. This problem truly ***** Apple!

Fix this issue soon please! Or you will receive your device back with my irritated compliments.

So I had read on another message board about doing the software update to resolve the issue, so I did. My apple tv acted very strange after the update, was trying to mirrow an ipad, it got static and glitches and froze.

So to my surprise, unlike the original ATV which had a hard drive and could be reset by commands on the remote, kind of like an ipod, the ATV needs to be hooked up to your computer.

But wait, what do you mean apple is using a new mini usb cable that didn't come with it? So I would have to BUY a new usb cable just to TRY and reset my ATV.

I purchased mine from a local dealer, so I am taking it back to them and saying "Please fix this or let me return it".

In concept I would love to use it. I loved and still love my ATV 1, with the hard drive, but it couldn't stream netflix.

This new ATV has not made me think much of the future of Streaming though.

After reading the post about resetting my ATV and then reapply the software update I tried to do just that.

Although, after restting it, it didn't prompt me to re-apply update, it was already at the latest level. However, my box worked perfectly after that and have watched a load of stuff now with no problems at all. I have it plugged into both wired and wireless but my mac book is just on wireless.

Try just resetting, worked for me.

I'm going to pass on your success with this to my Apple dealer. Maybe they can reset mine. I'll post here if it works for me. Mine would not let me reset from the remote, it died completely.

I tried resetting and restoring mine, no difference, it still takes hours to buffer a simple movie from iTunes. I've been dealing with this for months looking through the various threads and the only constants have been appologetic ****-tard fanboys blaming everyone's network connections and a complete and utter lack of response from Apple. I'm so ****** I'm about to drive by an apple store and pitch this little plastic piece of **** through the glass doors.

I too have been experiencing the annoying intermittent pausing and buffering when watching TV shows from our ATV3, bought 27 Dec. Have tried all the above fixits on this topic (I am using a fast wifi connection) and just did the reset, as suggested. This appears to have worked ... but time will tell. 🙂

I did a reset on 13 Jan and ATV3 was working ok at first ... then the buffering issues came back! Following the Apple troubleshooting, I changed the ATV3's resolution in iTunes settings down to 720p HD. Then was able to watch rest of TV show Mad Men without making us mad with the painfully slow buffering! I bought the ATV3 because it offers 1080p HD. I have broadband cable, connected by fast wifi to the ATV3 through latest Netgear wifi router.

I too have had trouble streaming a purchased movie in HD with my ATV3. I suspect that this is an iTunes congestion issue. I'm not sure that the iTunes Store is quite as optimized for streaming with huge numbers of simultaneous connections as Netflix is. Hopefully Apple will improve their cloud services to be able to handle the number of customers they have. It is very, very disappointing to plunk down money and then not be able to stream the content.

Just curious. Has anyone looked at the encoding of their media with Quicktime Pro? I was having issues with some 7-8min home movies I encoded with Airvideo that would sit buffering for 5-6 minutes even before it would start to play. I noticed that there are not any 'hint' tracks. Apple recommends this for quicktime for internet streaming, but wondered if it would help a local lan setup as well?

I will try this tomorrow sometime with a few home videos I had issues with.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2438

Add another person to list. Apple TV 3, huge long download times from the iTunes stores for all movies and TV sows. Intermittent but very annoying. I have 15 MB download speed (just tested).

I have noticed that when you select a program to play if the "authorizing" statement doesn't come up, it is an ultra slow download, but if it display "authorizing" quickly the download stream as it used to.

Come on Apple, there is a real problem here somewhere.

Brant