Apple TV - painfully slow buffering

I thought that manually configuring my DNS in this manner did the job. However, after just a bit the Apple TV was buffering again. Do you think it can be the particular show we purchased? Other movies and series have streamed with no problem from the cloud.

One of the tech's at my ISP that I've been dealing with on this spoke to Akamai and came back and said that it is possible that the content I was trying to stream was not on the local mirror node and therefore it has to go and get it from a central server offshore with higher latency.

I'm not sure how Akamai content distribution works because I have tried old shows, new shows and even shows that I recently downloaded and then tried to stream again. You'd think that a recently downloaded show would be kept on a local node for a while.

Anyway, made no difference. I still think the poblems is a routing issue between my ISP and Akamai. I recently (this week) changed to a new ISP and all my problems have gone away. I can see that no matter which show I try and stream it resolves to a local Akamai node and is very fast. Buffering has gone for me.

I had this problem with Game of thrones, I was using my own DNS and that caused waiting times like 234 hours. As soon as I took it off and set it to automatic and rebooted it loaded instantly, at 1080p and haven't had a problem.

Manually configuring the DNS settings on my Apple TV 2 to point directly to my router's IP address fixed the buffering problems for me.

Did this for all the fixed clients in my house aswell. Besides fixing the ATV buffering provblems, it improved the speedtest.net performance on my desktop by about 20%.

I have a Cisco RV042 Dual WAN VPN Router and a Pakedge WAP using 802.1g to service the wireless / mobile clients.

My ATV has got an ethernet connection (hard wired) to the router.

I tried almost everything imaginable to get my AppleTV to download faster. I purchased a movie on iTunes and it took 4 hrs to watch an move that was only an hour and a half. I got frustrated and quit. Then when I logged into my iMac the next morning, I poked around in my System Report and saw that two other networks (belonging to my neighbors) were on the same channel as me. I was trying to download my movie at 8:00 pm, a high traffic internet time of day. I contacted my ISP to have them change the channel on my router and everything is gravy now.

If your problem persists and your download speed is ok after a speed test, check the channel on your router. Its a simple fix and takes only as long as having your ISP answer the call.

Restarting my Apple TV 2 resolved this for me. So worth a shot if you haven't tried it. (I had spent two hours browsing forums looking for a solution before trying this, so hopefully this helps someone else too.)

I was having extremely slow buffering AirPlaying from two iPhones to my ethernet connected Apple TV 2. Meanwhile, my Mac (also on wifi) was Airplaying/mirroring just fine. After the restart of the Apple TV, everything is performing as expected.

I've started to get this message whenever I want to play a movie (even on movies I bought years ago) on my Apple TV, "To start playback sooner for future rentals and purchases, go to Settings>iTunes Store and select a lower video resolution"

Any solutions?

I am depressed because I received an ATV for Christmas and was wondering what was wrong with it! It took forever to buffer iTunes content that I gave up and have been watching Netflix. I tried changing my video resolution but it did not help at all. Apple always has such great products that I am in serious shock and disappointment by the performance of the ATV! What a bummer. They better correct this mess soon because meanwhile word will spread.

I was experiencing a very very slow streaming of videos taken from my iPhone 5. A 2 minute video would take around 5 minutes to buffer then starts playing.

The Apple TV is connected through wireless wifi.

Then I found out that my iPhone and Apple TV were using different wifi SSID as I have two wireless routers.

I switch my iPhone to use the same SSID or wireless router as the Apple TV and this eliminated the slow streaming of videos from iPhone to Apple TV. It's good now and actually enjoy using Apple TV!!!

Also you can download an app to remote control your Apple TV using your idevice - it's nice!!!

Did you try changing the DNS address to point directly to your router IP address? Or, in my case, I fixed it by telling my router to use my service provider's (Time Warner Cable's) default DNS address rather than the OpenDNS address I had been using.

Just figured out my problem. Thought I would pass it along. I went through the following:

1) Test your wifi -- Is the signal strong to the apple tv?

2) Test your wifi to your laptop -- Can you sustain at least 6 mb/s? Try doing a file transfer to another file server. I was able to walk from the place closest to my wifi router (39 mb/s), and then farthest away (10 mb/s).

3) Reboot everything (computer, ATV, router.

4) Remove sources of interference. I had heard wireless phones can interfere -- I turned them off.

At this point, It still didn't work. Using menu meters I was getting about 500kbs transfer rate from my laptop to the atv.

Then I started looking for sources of interference around the tv. Turns out I had a sound bar that used wifi-direct to talk to a subwoofer.

Bingo.

I moved the atv about 4 feet from the sound bar, and I no longer have the problem.

I still get the ATV cutting out (it goes back to the main menu). This is always accompanied by itunes resetting the movie to the begining (i.e. it looses its place in the move).

I'm assuming this is a separate problem that has nothing to do with communications.

Mike

I have been trying everything....I'm just trying to watch a youtube video...it need to buffer for a good 45 minutes before I can even start it...... Hooked up the Ethernet cable an bypassed wifi...same issue...tried port forwarding as suggested somewhere else and it just won't work..... But, I can load the same youtube video on my iPad and it loads and works just fine in a few seconds.... So then I send it from my iPad to the Apple TV and watch anything that way without waiting for the buffer.... This tells me it's not my slow DSL speed, not my Internet or LAN...nothing to do with the wifi.....it loads on my iPad and wifi it to the apple tv just fine.... But it won't buffer trying youtube from the Apple TV....go figure...

Any ideas..? Please help...

Thanks

We've been having the same issue! I hope apple pays attention to all these comments. All of the other functions work very well. iTunes content purchases and rental load almost instantly 50% of the time and the rest of the time they take ridiculous amounts of time. Makes us want to switch to amazon!! :(

Don't want to though.

I have a network with a Wireless Router in front of my Apple TV. I used the method whereby you make the DNS Server for the Apple TV the Router's IP Address. This fixed all of my issues with unexplained buffering.

Don't expect any response from Apple. Hasn't been any comment within the thread of this issue.

I've had the issue for over a year without success until just this week.

It kept telling me that the wifi network speed will cause issues. Even when iPhones were working fine with connections in the same room. This week I hooked the itv to the timecapsule with a LAN cable. For some reason it did not work and I could not connect through this LAN connection. I had a green screen with the apple logo in the middle. So ran through the wifi again. Worked no buffering. So I took itv back to TV room reconnected. Since then no buffering. I can not explain nor give a logical technical reason as I did nothing to expect this result.

Like so many with this issue each have a different story of success and or failure.

As I said don't expect an answer from Apple even with a Billion dollars of Apple TV sales