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Home Sharing stops working, have to restart itunes

S

seniorchang

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 14, 2012
78
0
I have a problem with home sharing. After watching one episode of a tv show home sharing stops working. When I want to start the next episode the loading icon just appears an nothing happens. When I restart the apple tv it won't see my imac library at all. the only thing fixing it is restarting itunes, but it gets annoying having to do this after each episode.

this problem startet since itunes 11. before it was working flawlessly for years.

I have latest itunes, apple tv 3, mountain lion and 2012 21 imac.

I have also tried resetting the apple tv, rebooting the router but nothing helped.

Any ideas?
 
Deadeyeshark

Deadeyeshark

macrumors regular
Aug 1, 2011
248
144
England
seniorchang said:
I have a problem with home sharing. After watching one episode of a tv show home sharing stops working. When I want to start the next episode the loading icon just appears an nothing happens. When I restart the apple tv it won't see my imac library at all. the only thing fixing it is restarting itunes, but it gets annoying having to do this after each episode.

this problem startet since itunes 11. before it was working flawlessly for years.

I have latest itunes, apple tv 3, mountain lion and 2012 21 imac.

I have also tried resetting the apple tv, rebooting the router but nothing helped.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Home Sharing is great, but it's never been flawless. I have six ATV's and 99% of the time they stay on HS without issue, my problem is different though. There are a number of things to try.

Make sure ATV never goes to sleep, change this in your ATV settings

HS never worked properly until I swapped out my router for an Apple Airport Extreme.

Make sure your Macs HD never go to sleep.

Turn off everything that is connected to your network, reboot your router and restart everything again.

Swear at your ATV, loudly. Doesn't help fix it, but it makes you feel better.

Good luck!
 
S

seniorchang

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 14, 2012
78
0
I did everything you said, but it didn't help.

One question though:
My itunes library is on external HD, meaning the whole itunes folder inclluding all files. I have set the HD to never go to sleep in energy preferences.

Do you think that having the itunes folder on an external hd can cause problems none the less?
 
Deadeyeshark

Deadeyeshark

macrumors regular
Aug 1, 2011
248
144
England
No, this should make no difference. I have a four bay USB external drive with 4 x 2tb hard drives, not had any issues with this.

Are you connecting your ATV through ethernet or wireless?
 
S

seniorchang

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 14, 2012
78
0
I have a wireless connection and nothing goes into sleep mode, I turned all those settings off.

As I said, the problems started with itunes 11, even on my old imac. Before that everything was working fine an I never had issues.

I also have problems with iphone wifi syncing since the itunes update. Is there any easy way going back to itunes 10?
 
W

whoiare

macrumors regular
Aug 30, 2011
102
14
take your apple tv 3 off of wired ethernet and just run wireless... This issue has been discussed in at length. There seems to be some timeout issues with the apple tv 3 and itunes, but switching to wireless only on the atv fixed it for me
 
S

sportster

macrumors 6502
Jul 7, 2010
271
0
Katy, TX
I too have had issues with my AppleTV's (currently have 3 AppleTV 2's). My setup includes iTunes hosted on my iMac, Airport extreme router, then the AppleTV's. All running wirelessly. The sharing issues have been progressively getting worse over the years. Most times a simple restart of iTunes works, sometimes it takes a full reboot of everything.
 
P

Pock

macrumors regular
Apr 22, 2012
182
9
Beds/Cambs, UK
Nearly every time I wake up my Apple TV to watch something from my iTunes library I have to go upstairs and restart iTunes. I've been having this problem for years and thought it may have been fixed by now!
 
L

lexvo

macrumors 65816
Nov 11, 2009
1,467
551
The Netherlands
In most cases a quicker workaround is turning off and then on again home sharing on the AppleTV (so you don't have to go to your iMac or PC to restart iTunes).
 
S

scottw324

macrumors 6502
Mar 5, 2012
453
1
whoiare said:
take your apple tv 3 off of wired ethernet and just run wireless... This issue has been discussed in at length. There seems to be some timeout issues with the apple tv 3 and itunes, but switching to wireless only on the atv fixed it for me
Click to expand...

I am running into the same issue with one of my apple TV 3s. It is running as wireless and when it loses connection to my Mac Mini I have to restart the ATV3 to get it to connect to HS again.
 
N

Non-Euclidean

macrumors member
Dec 21, 2012
43
3
Houston, TX
scottw324 said:
I am running into the same issue with one of my apple TV 3s. It is running as wireless and when it loses connection to my Mac Mini I have to restart the ATV3 to get it to connect to HS again.
Click to expand...

Double check that everything has fixed IP addresses. If its all dynamic, and everything isnt on all the time, then the ATV can have connection issues. That was my problem, I solved it by giving every device except phones a fixed IP at the upper end of my range in my router setup, so phones and other peoples devices can play in the bottom end.
 
Hermes Monster

Hermes Monster

macrumors 65816
May 4, 2010
1,204
552
UK
I too have been having this issue for months. I've given up on home sharing as my default way of sharing, instead I go upstairs to the iMac and use airplay to watch something. Pretty much the opposite of the convenient solution I was hoping for.

I do however use the Caffeine app. to stop the iMac going to sleep, after I've watched something via AirPlay, home sharing will generally work

It's a pretty ugly solution, but seems to be working :rolleyes:
 
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