Q: AppleTV losing sync with home sharing
First my set up: I have an AppleTV 2nd gen and AppleTV 3rd gen (both up to date), Windows 10 computer, iTunes 12.3.2.35 (the latest version), Airport Express (also up to date) router hooked up to my cable company's modem (purchased Airport because the wifi on the cable modem was crap and I was having to restart the modem on a daily basis). I have set both the Windows Firewall and the Firewall on the cable modem to accept UDP Port 5353 for Bonjour (in fact Bonjour on the Windows Firewall is set up to accept any port).
The problem: For the first 8 months I've had the Airport Express it was great. I was finally able to reliably use the AppleTV without having to restart anything. A couple of weeks ago, I started having problems where I would turn on the AppleTV and it would tell me it couldn't access homesharing and that I should make sure the computer is on the same network, iTunes up to date and such. All of which is up to date and I only have one network that all the devices are signed into. Generally restarting iTunes resolves the problem, but that's not really an option when one of the AppleTVs is connected to and playing something from iTunes. At this point you can still stream from iTunes purchases, YouTube and the other apps, it just doesn't recognize the computer itunes library. Going under the General tab and restarting the AppleTV doesn't work, nor does disconnecting and reconnecting it to the network. On rare occasions I have had to just reboot everything (not sure if the router and modem require restart, but since I was waiting for the computer I figured it didn't hurt).
I'm just wondering if anyone can offer insight/advice as to why the AppleTV intermittently does not recognize the computer for homesharing, especially when the other AppleTV is happily streaming something from the iTunes library on my PC. I want to say that it was initially working fine on the last version (12.3.0.44), but it was definitely having the connection issue before 12.3.2.35 was released and it hasn't gotten better with the update. Googling around the internet, I have seen comments about turning off IPv6, but I'd rather not do that because that is likely to cause other problems down the road.
Apple TV (3rd generation)
Posted on Dec 22, 2015 8:30 AM