Apple TV 4 cannot be used simultaneously with other Apple TVs

Diana_McCall, I'll try renaming the new one. The old ones are living room and play room, but this one still has the default AppleTV name.

For the homesharing, I had all the ports open through Windows Firewall, and back before the Airport Express on the Netgear Modem. I turned off Windows Firewall in hopes of that improving the stability of randomly being unable to connect to HomeSharing and that really hasn't helped. I've more or less given up on Windows and homesharing working well together. This was an issue I had with both Windows 7 and 10. Sometimes it will go more than a week without this issues and other times it's 2-3 times a day, which makes it hard to troubleshoot given the utter randomness of it.

The new issue with AppleTV losing it's mind and breaking the internet connection happened two nights in a row when the AppleTV 2 was turned on, so that's less random, other than just starting up after working for around 2 weeks. Like I said, once everyone is off to school and work, I can play around with the devices and see if I can recreate the failure, hopefully on the same floor to minimize running up and down stairs (though the modem and router are upstairs to improve household connectivity).

Thanks for all your advice, Diana.McCall. I do have one correction: The second AppleTV activated the last 2 nights was the 3rd gen, not 2nd - they get swapped around a lot.

The IP and DNS for all three are set to automatic.

The Netgear router is in bridge mode. I made sure that got turned on and the Netgear wifi disabled when I got the Airport Express about a year ago. On the note of that, I gave my network a name rather than use the generic one given by Cox and also a distinct password.

What happened the last two nights is that the AppleTV 4 could see the iTunes library on the computer. It just wouldn't load any content. The same for looking at purchased movies. Most of the thumbnails weren't loading (and handful did), but you could see the movie names in the purchased library. When trying to access a movie (we only tried the one we were trying to watch which did not have a thumbnail) the information would not load. I tried using Siri search to find the movie and other movies with 'Martian' in the name, showed up in the search, but the purchased 'The Martian' was a grey thumbnail. As DH was a bit impatient to get the movie started, I didn't have a lot of time to investigate what was happening unfortunately.

This morning I hooked up a small TV in the living room and brought the AppleTV 3 downstairs. After starting the 4 with a movie from my iTunes library, I pulled up a different movie for the 3 and it worked. I then started the 2 in our play room and the 4 kept playing, but the 3 froze into buffering (the donut of death as DH calls it). I have since moved the 3 back to the master bedroom and started it and currently all 3 are playing movies with no hiccups. No settings were changed last night and I would presume that since I all data is being transmitted within the house from my computer (which only has Outlook, iTunes and Firefox running and last night only had iTunes), that it shouldn't matter how congested Cox's network was (and this happened around 9pm give or take 30 minutes both nights). I could see how things might break down if I was trying to stream from the cloud as I have had buffering incidents while trying to stream from NBCSports App in the evening on the 3.

So this morning for reasons understood by none, I am able to simultaneously stream on all 3 AppleTVs (ran all three for about 20 minutes before shutting down the 2 & 3). Just like last night no other devices outside of my computer were being used to access the internet. We'll try again tonight and see if this is just some random thing that was happening in the evenings (and only began on Friday). I did set the 3 to SD as it's on a 32" TV and you can't really tell the difference too much between SD and HD when you are 7 feet or more from the TV.

Vinceassociate, thanks for the link. I tried all that about 4 years ago when I started having the AppleTV randomly drop connection. I'm thinking of reactivating the Windows Firewall with the additional ports Diana.McCall pointed out as it really didn't seem to make a difference whether the firewall is on or not with the dropping of Homesharing. The most annoying part is when it drops Homesharing while you are in the middle of watching something. I can almost see it having problems when it wakes up from Sleep mode, but to drop out in the middle of a connection seems really odd. Like I said, I have kind of given up and just accepted the fact I'm going to have to deal with this issue because I'm using a Windows computer instead of a Mac (purely for financial reasons since I can get about 5 years out of a $400 Windows machine vs spending about 3 times that on a Mac and the fact my external media drive is formatted in NTFS (though a quick search shows that has been enabled now, even if using that feature is quite hidden). Since it can be corrected with a quick restart of iTunes 99.9% of the time, I live with it. Kind of like how every now and then you need to restart any electronic device.

I know that has been a problem in the past. I have the Airport Express set to automatically pick the best channel and it seems to work well. Normally wifi interference leads to just buffering issues (at least before we got the 4) and not a complete inability of the device to access the store or computer library, though perhaps it just shows an initial buffering problem differently. I do have a wifi program that shows who is using what around me and last night we were on what the program says was the best channel. Sadly my current laptop does not support 5GHz (pickings were slim on Win 7 machines when I got mine about 2 years ago and that wasn't an option - it has since been upgraded to Win 10). I may look into spending the $20 or so to replace the wifi card. I did that on my old laptop when we seemed to be having issues, but it didn't help all that much.

Living in California, houses are pretty close together and the number of wifi networks in my area seems to have gone up. My computer used to pick up about 8, but today it looks like around 15, though a lot of them are pretty weak. I have two near neighbors whose signals are similar to mine.

If I have issues again tonight (once hockey is concluded for the night), I'll keep in mind switching the channel again. And if it does happen again, I think I will be looking at getting a new wifi card and hoping HP makes it as easy to swap out as Dell did (they do not an whitelist network adapters so it'll be some work for me). If the past is an indication, there aren't many 5GHz users because Cox doesn't issue routers that can use it and they are the only provider we get where I live (no FiOS or Uverse, heck I'm pretty sure I looked and the phone company doesn't even provide DSL to our neighborhood, not that I want DSL, but others might be interested in that given the high cost of cable and number of Dish users in my neighborhood).

Thanks again for all your thoughts. I had thought about interference last night and it will definitely be more in my mind if it happens again since everything worked earlier today. Makes sense it would be more of an issue on weekend evenings, though not sure what happened last night. Once I got the 4 stable, I was able to stream from a FireTV Stick without 'breaking' the AppleTV 4 connection.

The switching wifi channels may have worked. I was trying to watch a movie this evening and it paused to buffer. When I opened the wifi monitor, it suggested I switch to a different channel from the one it had recommended earlier in the day. I manually switched the channel and we were able to get it playing again (as an aside, it's a bit bothersome that the Airport Express needs to reset itself when you change channels so that it loses connection to everything - that was one thing the Netgear router side did better, it would just switch channels). Once on the newly recommended channel there was also no issue when the AppleTV 3 was fired up in the master bedroom.

I have still ordered a new wifi card that is dual band in hopes of avoiding this issue in the future. Between microwaves, garage door openers and other routers in the neighborhood there's a lot of traffic on the 2.4GHz band.

Thanks for all your suggestions Diana.McCall. I still plan on testing out the Windows Firewall ports you mentioned, but I wanted to deal with one thing at a time.

Gotta love changes in software. Seems kind of odd that it would work this way given that so many Apple engineers live in what is probably an even more crowded environment than mine (I'm at least California suburban and not in a San Fran apartment building). Trust me, I know all about radio signals as have an MS in applied physics. I'm household tech support and it was also a great source of frustration for me as I know that there is no logical reason why they shouldn't have been able to work at the same time and it really didn't make sense for interference to crash the AppleTV 4 like it did (I've also done my share of computer programming, too). So it's partly congested neighborhood and partly poorly written software. I'm hoping that come Wednesday the new wifi card will work (HP whitelists certain cards on a per computer basis and I did order one on that list that other HP users had reported success with, though if they still have an online parts store, it doesn't appear to be working anymore or not working through Firefox).

Anyway, the congestion does explain why there is no problems with it during the day because other than the retired couple on one side, I think the other 4 nearest neighbors work during the day. Still odd how it suddenly became a problem after more than a week, but technology.

As an aside, I learned that the old remotes transmit signals that can be picked up by the new box, though the commands aren't the same. At least being IR I could just face the old box away from the new one and it quit pausing the movie as I was checking settings. 🙂

I think you can, but since they are so small, we have a tendency to misplace one or the other (and in fact operated the recliner on one so that the down doesn't work any more and had to replace it). Since we don't usually have more than one AppleTV in a room, it's not an issue. Just something I found when I had the 3 and 4 in the same room testing things out. As a whole I find the remote more useful if you want to scroll down a big list of stuff over the app or even over the new remote as I'm still getting used to the touch pad and wholly disappointed the Siri search function won't search your personal iTunes library, but only the purchases so you would end up playing the streaming version instead of the locally stored version.

Diana.McCall,

I just wanted to report that the interference problem has been non-existent with the new wifi card for the PC (of note for anyone with an HP, go to their website and check the manual for your specific computer to make sure you get one compatible - I bought one of the models listed off Amazon for $16 - which was way less than the $50-100 extra they wanted to charge for a dual band wifi card with BlueTooth when I ordered the computer). While it was not easy to replace since the HP I have does not have an access door on the bottom like the last 3 Dells that I have owned over the last 15 years or so, it was not beyond and reasonably tech savvy person's ability.

I do still have the intermittent AppleTVs not recognizing that homesharing is indeed active, but restarting iTunes generally clears that up. I whole-heartedly believe it is an issue with Bonjour on the PC (since with previous computers and internet configurations I have opened various ports on both router and PC firewalls and it still drops from time to time). I just know that Apple software does not always play nicely with PCs and given that this one is pretty much always on, I kind of expect glitches. Windows 10 makes stopping and the starting Bonjour up a little difficult. I used to be able to do it from the Task Manager, but once I stop it, it goes away. It's just simpler to restart iTunes, which based on someone else's thread, I was afraid was not going to work, but so far it has.