I get "request timed out" or continued buffering in about 5 second intervals when connecting to Home Sharing files.

I have my video and music archives on my iMac and have enabled Home Sharing through iTunes. When I try to play either music or videos from my iPad or iPhone I get either an error saying the request timed out or on the few times things do try to play the files buffer continually and I'm only able to watch/listen to about 5 seconds at a time. I have the latest version of iTunes installed on all of my devices. Any thoughts???