Home sharing slow initial connection

Question

Home sharing slow initial connection

Hi guys and girls

I recently upgraded my media server, it's a good spec machine but I still have consistent problems with home sharing, the main one being that the initial connection from either of my 2 Apple TVs or iPad2, when it works, takes ages. Below is my set up, specs and other info.

Issues

Start Apple TV/iPad and connect to Media Server, spinning icon for 30-60 seconds then connects.

Start Apple TV/iPad and connect to Media Server, spinning icon for 60+ seconds and then fails. Trying again sometimes works sometimes doesn't.

Apple TV says no computers running home sharing (turn itunes off and on again usually resolves). This happens when iTunes has been running for a couple of days.

Moving between Films/TV Shows/Music on the ATVs brings up the spinning icon for 30+ seconds again.

Album artwork on iPad takes a long time to load and is often mixed up. Initial TV show cover art is for one program but when I tap on it I get a completely different program, and the correct art work.

Good points

Once connected all shows stream without issue

Airplaying from iPad to either AppleTV works without issue

Router

Linksys WAG320N wireless N + 4 port Gigabit switch

Spec of Media Server

Asus P8H77-i motherboard

Intel i5 3450 Processor

8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM

2x2tb SATA II HDDs in RAID 1

Windows 7 Pro x64.

iTunes 11.0.1.12

gigabit network on board linked to main router

iTunes library is all MP3s (40GB) and MP4s (350GB films / 800GB TV Shows)

Apple TV2

Gigabit Ethernet connection to main router, latest software

Apple TV3

Wireless N connection to main router, latest software

Things I've tried

I've turned off IPv6 on the server.

Turned off AutoTuning on network adapter

Turned off Remote Differential Compression

Siging out/back in to home sharing on iPad temporarily resolves cover art issue.

As you can see the PC is more than capable of running iTunes and the network should be pretty lively as well. I've turned off some of the Windows 7 features that can cause slow networking with unsupported devices but that's made no difference. Any ideas why I'm getting these sort of issues or is this just normal behaviour for Windows 7 iTunes and Apple TVs/iPads? Any suggestions to resolve any of the issues?

Apple TV 3-OTHER, iOS 5.1.1

Posted on Feb 15, 2013 7:51 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 16, 2013 3:43 AM in response to alanfromchelmsford

Once again today my iTunes library is not showing on either Apple TV, I've rebooted the server, rebooted the router and rebooted the apple TV and it's still not showing.

Why is this software so flakey?

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Answer 2

Nov 1, 2013 7:54 AM in response to alanfromchelmsford

This is still an issue for me, i've hard wired both ATVs and upgraded both of them plus itunes to the latest versions of the software.

I timed my iPad connecting to the iTunes library and it sat with the little circle slowly going round for 7 minutes before finally connecting. Once connected I could watch whatever I wanted and had no problems streamin shows to the ipad but 7 minutes is unacceptable surely?

So much for Apple stuff just working. I can't see my text tablet being an iPad at this rate, it's so frustrating.

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Answer 3

Nov 13, 2013 12:10 PM in response to alanfromchelmsford

Whilst I can't say I entirely share your pain (my ATV connects to Home Sharing via iTunes on Windows 7) on my iPhone 4S and iPad 2 it always takes far too long to load (if it does at all).

It takes anything from 2-10 minutes if I allow it to load, otherwise I get frustrated, switch the silly thing of and revert to my Western Digital My Cloud app instead. Not ideal at all when I want to use iTunes to keep my 'watched' films/episodes updated seemlessly. You're right; It just rarely works.

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Answer 4

Nov 24, 2013 12:14 PM in response to alanfromchelmsford

Same issue here:

It takes between 1 and 5min to first load the artworks on my iPad 3/iPhone 5 (little circle thing)

Why sometimes 1 min and why other time 5min?

i'm all Apple: iPad, iMac (where iTunes is running), Airport Extreme, Apple TV, etc.

All is updated as it should be.

I've rebooted everything, etc.

All is good and fast with my Apple TVs (2)

Running on 5Ghz WiFi network also.

Once little is gone, all is good and fast...

Wish I could figure out what's going on at load time on iOS devices

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Answer 5

Nov 24, 2013 12:23 PM in response to johnnygoodface

Latest development:

Turning off the Firewall on my iMac (where my iTunes lib is) made the init loading blasing fast on both iPad/iPhone!!!!

Next step: I'm follwing a lead I read somewhere else which said:

"I manually opened TCP 123 and 3689 as well as UDP ports 123 and 5353"

I'll let you know how it went

Cheers

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Answer 6

Nov 25, 2013 4:24 AM in response to johnnygoodface

I'm pretty sure I've turned the firewall off on my windows machine and it made no difference, that means that opening ports wouldn't work either. Maybe you have a different issue.

I was thinking of going through all my itunes videos/mp3s and removing the artwork just to see if that makes a difference as I'm wondering if it trys to download all the artwork first for some reason?

The other thing I'm thinking is that it tries to download a full list of TV Shows, Films and Music that are in the library and that's why it takes ages waiting for that list?

Are there any good media streaming apps that display the artwork and everything similar to the built in ipad app but that works?

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Answer 7

Nov 25, 2013 4:29 AM in response to alanfromchelmsford

After doing so more test it seems I was wrong about the firewall.

Sorry to have missleaded you

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Answer 8

TheWeas

Level 1

5 points

Jan 31, 2014 6:04 AM in response to alanfromchelmsford

I was having the same issue, when I clicked on "shared" on my iPad, it would take forever to load (if it did). The fix for me was to go into iTunes preferences on my Mac and under the "Sharing" tab uncheck "Share my library on my local network". This was the "old" way of sharing music, this is unneccesary if you are using Home Sharing. But might be still necessary if you want to share you music around a company or school perhaps.

Once I wasn't sharing my media "two ways", videos loaded in about 30 seconds.

Hopefully this will work for you and anyone else experiencing slow catalog loading.

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Answer 9

Jan 31, 2014 6:56 AM in response to TheWeas

I already had that turned off and so it's not that causing it for me. I've also had a new router since this thread started (2 actually, a Draytek and a BT homehub) and it's made no difference at all to the time it takes to load so it's unlikely to be the router either.

I tried to play a video on my phone the other day (iPhone 4s) and actually gave up as it took over 10 minutes with no sign of working.

I've found that when I leave the media server on with iTunes open the second and all subsequent connections from the same device are reasonably quick, it's just the first connection from a device after iTunes is opened.

The latest versions of iTunes or iOS have made no difference, even the new shiny ios7 videos app has the same issues with the covers not matching what the program actually is. Do Apple actually do anything to fix these sort of bugs or do they not bother?

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Answer 10

Jan 31, 2014 7:01 AM in response to alanfromchelmsford

Just remembered, I've also rebuilt the media server, I replaced the HDD (C:\ drive) for a 128GB SSD that now has Windows 8.1 installed and also put in a 3TB SATA III HDD (WD Red) for the itunes library. No difference.

It's coming up to the 1 year anniversary of this issue being raised on here (it was happening before that) and Apple have done nothing to fix it. Roll on 2015, maybe it'll be fixed by then.

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Answer 11

Feb 2, 2014 8:39 AM in response to alanfromchelmsford

I may not have been entirely right about the Firewall, but turning it off and back on again certainly fixed (maybe temporarily) the problem.

When I completely close the Videos App either on my iPad/iPhone and reopen it, it loads the Artworks very fast, and it's been 24 hours now.

How long will this last? Don'know but I'll do the same trick the next time it becomes slow again.

Cheers all,

Jean

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