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Does AppleTV "just work" for anyone?

No. I have 4 of them and it is getting VERY annoying. The hardware cannot keep up with the software and an update is needed badly. I also think the software is not perfected either, and very buggy given all the glitches, but I mostly blame the crappy hardware.

It's a shame because when the Apple TV works perfectly, it is an amazing device and I really love it.
 
Mine works and has worked great! I use it in my bedroom, my only problem is that I don't have another one hooked up to my TV in my den!! I have over 350 movies in my iTunes Library and the 40 gb has worked without a glitch!
 
How I fixed my AppleTV

I like most have had a terrible time with the AppleTV. After a number of replacement units from the Genius Bar, I finally gave up and replaced the hard drive myself. I then ran the Samsung Utility Software on the old drive and it found error after error. I am not blaming Samsung but I am convinced the heat of the AppleTV destroyed the hard drive. It may be that the quiet Samsung drive may not be as robust as the Western Digital Blue 320 I am now using. The Western Digital is a laptop drive, I am not convinced the Apple Samsung is not a special purpose drive no matter what the specs state.:apple:
 
I have two. They gave me nothing but trouble for the longest time. But for the past 9 months or so they have been perfect.

Update ATV software
Update iTunes
Wired connection
Computer never sleeps
Media library hard drive connected directly to mac
not network attached storage

I have one atv that I rarely use that is connected wirelessly. It too seems to be working pretty darn good right now.
 
MoonFri said:
I like most have had a terrible time with the AppleTV...
Click to expand...
Like most? Considering that Apple is rumored to have sold over six million Apple TVs I'm not sure that there is any evidence that "most" have had a "terrible time with the Apple TV." Let's say that 1% has had serious problems, that would mean that 60,000 customers would be out there to report their "terrible" experiences with the Apple TV and that could make for a lot of "noise" on the internet.

As for myself, I've had the same Apple TV for almost three years now and its performance over the last six months has almost been flawless. Prior to that time I had some WiFi connection issues, but those were resolved with some changes in my network setup and with software updates from Apple. The only issues I have now are some slight hesitations in the GUI when I push the system to its limits (jumping into and out of various functions while at the same time playing media in the background).

At least in my hands, the Apple TV has worked well, it's not perfect but it's actually a good value for $230 (U.S.).
 
I had terrible issues with my Apple TV for a year or so - dropped connection with iTunes, ATV forgetting the network password continuously, random restarts, glitchy playback etc etc. It was becoming unusable and I was seriously considering selling it.

The recent software updates fixed most of these things and recently I troubleshooted my network, found that something somewhere was interfering with my network causing the Apple TV to drop it - the thing that seemed to fix it was activating 'interference robustness' on the network. Now I have an absolutely rock solid setup - iTunes always finds the ATV and the ATV has never dropped the network. Playback of everything is perfect and it's now a genuine pleasure to use...
 
Works fine, needs more horsepower.

I have ~1000 movies being served up via a (rather old now) Intel core duo Mini. I am streaming via hardwire. I usually reboot about once a month. If the iTunes library is greyed out (on occasion but rare) I know to just remote connect to the Mini, quit iTunes and relaunch and all is well again.

I wish it could handle 1080p ( I need more power Scotty)

I have 2 movies I can't get to show up no matter how I encode them.

1) Terminator Salvation
2) Couples Retreat

It works pretty darn well for me.
 
Now running 4 without any problems.

I must admit that I read this forum a lot and often wonder what I am doing right :) My setup has grown over the years and, in terms of storage, is about 90GB music, 900GB TV shows, 1.6TB movies and 120GB photos. I made a decision long ago that I would run a small dedicated iTunes machine (was Vista but is now 64bit Windows 7) given the signicant investment I had made in the libraries. I use Always Sync to keep a "mirror copy" of the library on a NAS which lives in my attic. The computer itself is a small Shuttle box using an Intel E7500 and 3x 1.5TB disks running in Raid 0. ALL it runs is iTunes...NOTHING ELSE! We now have 4 ATV's running throughout the house. 3 are hardwired but one is wireless. I use Airport Extreme (802.11n) for my wireless network (usually about 7 clients depending on who is home). Whenever we travel away for a longer period of time we pick up the Shuttle and the Wireless ATV and take them both with us (with a little Airport Express for wireless in case we need it). I keep all music on the ATV, unwatched TV shows and some photos. I stream everything else. All the kids have there own iTunes library but the library on the Shuttle is the master copy.

On refection, I would have to reboot one of the ATV's maybe once per month, maybe even less. The only real gripe I have with the product is the way it handles photos, but I can live with that. The iTunes PC has never stopped (except for some Windows maintenance) and runs 24 hours per day.

All in all we are an ATV family and EVERYBODY is happy because it is so easy to use. BUT the main test is my wife who absolutely loves it.

I don't understand why others are having so many problems but, for me at least, I believe the decision to run with a dedicated iTunes PC probably makes the difference.
 
crhendo said:
I must admit that I read this forum a lot and often wonder what I am doing right :) My setup has grown over the years and, in terms of storage, is about 90GB music, 900GB TV shows, 1.6TB movies and 120GB photos. I made a decision long ago that I would run a small dedicated iTunes machine (was Vista but is now 64bit Windows 7) given the signicant investment I had made in the libraries. I use Always Sync to keep a "mirror copy" of the library on a NAS which lives in my attic. The computer itself is a small Shuttle box using an Intel E7500 and 3x 1.5TB disks running in Raid 0. ALL it runs is iTunes...NOTHING ELSE! We now have 4 ATV's running throughout the house. 3 are hardwired but one is wireless. I use Airport Extreme (802.11n) for my wireless network (usually about 7 clients depending on who is home). Whenever we travel away for a longer period of time we pick up the Shuttle and the Wireless ATV and take them both with us (with a little Airport Express for wireless in case we need it). I keep all music on the ATV, unwatched TV shows and some photos. I stream everything else. All the kids have there own iTunes library but the library on the Shuttle is the master copy.

On refection, I would have to reboot one of the ATV's maybe once per month, maybe even less. The only real gripe I have with the product is the way it handles photos, but I can live with that. The iTunes PC has never stopped (except for some Windows maintenance) and runs 24 hours per day.

All in all we are an ATV family and EVERYBODY is happy because it is so easy to use. BUT the main test is my wife who absolutely loves it.

I don't understand why others are having so many problems but, for me at least, I believe the decision to run with a dedicated iTunes PC probably makes the difference.
Click to expand...

This is very similar to what i have done as well and can't imagine a day without it. We use our 2 AppleTV's constantly and our library continues to grow. I'm so thankful for worry-free mirror backups to our mediaserver and both units run wirelessly and sync daily from the server. It just works!
 
I frequently wonder too what people do to mess up there macs or in this case the Apple TV. Maybe I have been lucky.

I have had no problems with my 40 gig since they were first introduced. "Knock on wood" I purchased mine just a few weeks after they first came out. I mostly watch movies. So easy. I have mine connected via HDMI to a Samsung LCD and wirelessly from my Airport Extreme. I have never attempted mess with it or change anything. Just do the updates as they come along. Maybe the time is still not quite right for this product. If Apple really put some more into it Blockbusters would already be closed down by now.

I do not know why Apple does not put more into this product.
 
Hopefully I'm not jinxing myself

I've had an appleTV for 18 months and have never had to even pull the plug and reset it. It has worked flawlessly.

The only problems I've ever had are it not recognising a vodcast format once and youtube can be slow sometimes (although I am in Australia and I think that youtube through appleTV gets filtered/format switched through apple in the US or something). I would hardly even call these appleTV issues.

My appleTV is sync'd to my iMac itunes library. Probably 50% music, 40% video and 10% photos. Just before I got my appleTV I renovated my house and cat6 cabled the house so the sync has been across the cat6 (including the original set-up sync) until November when I got an iphone and had to pull the ethernet on the appleTV so that I could use the wifi remote app. I haven't noticed any difference between sync'n over wifi or the cat6. The wifi is served from a time capsule that is cat6 cabled to the router/modem (which in turn is cat 6 cabled to the imac that has the itunes library on it). Actually, the only thing I've noticed more since connecting through wifi is that the appleTV turns itself on more often now, ie, from standby to on, this was less common with ethernet.

I think lots of problems you read about here are with streaming. If you have a 160G+ collection of media surely you can just sync a 160G portion at a time and swap it out as needed - like you do with an iphone? Just a thought.
 
I've had my ATV for about 2 years. I've had to reboot it once during that time period. I have about 170 movies, 15k songs. All streamed. No syncing. Over wireless G network.

Everything works perfect. No menu lags. (No idea what that actually is since I've never seen it on my device.)

The only quibble is rewind on movies is jumpy .. but I'm fairly certain that the wireless G network.

I should also add that renting HD movies works great over my FIOS connection. Ready to start playing in about 10 seconds. Smooth streaming the whole way.
 
ibglowin said:
I have 2 movies I can't get to show up no matter how I encode them.

1) Terminator Salvation
2) Couples Retreat
Click to expand...

FWIW, I have ripped both of these from BD using MakeMKV, and then encoded them at 720p in Handbrake (using a tweaked Apple TV preset). Both sync/stream to my ATVs just fine.

The only times when a movie I have encoded is added to iTunes but won't show up on my ATVs is when the resultant file is over 5 gigs. Check the file size of these two, as that may be your problem. When this happens, I re-encode from the original rip, setting the target file size in Handbrake to 4 gig, and it returns a file that's a fraction over 4 gigs which is fine for the ATVs.
 
Ours has been mostly fine. Like the poster with nearly a TB of movies, tons of music, etc. We have the same deal, hosted on our Mac Pro. Tons of disk full of media and it all plays fine.

ATV software works fine (one caveat, below), hardware's been perfectly reliable, etc.

The only issue is the laggy slow UI. Movies stream fine, music plays fine, that's all great. But, moving between menu items is really slow. Updates haven't helped, rebooting doesn't help, etc. I always wonder if syncing media locally would make a difference, but I'd assume it caches the iTunes index when the ATV sync's with iTunes. Otherwise, what else is it syncing? I don't store media locally.
 
Mostly problem free

I've had pretty good luck with mine. The only issues I still have are:

1) the clicking sound when navigating through menus drops out occasionally. It will come back randomly on its own. Not a big deal, but just annoying.

2) For some downloads, I'll get two identical files. The problem seems to happen more with HD movies and TV shows. (I know that there's an SD download as well, but sometimes I'll get two HD files.)

3) For some movies with iTunes Extra, it will either not download, or will show up as an additional download at the end of the movie list and not be part of the movie.

I enjoy using the Apple TV, but if I can solve these problems, it would be perfect.
 
Only major problem I had were frequent wireless drops, which were solved by bumping the wireless to 5ghz N. Though a couple times the audio signal froze up. Like I would go from a movie to music but my receiver kept showing output as Dolby Surround so the music couldn't be heard. Did have to re-start it to fix that. That was annoying. This could be my receiver too but it's only ever happened while using the Appletv. That said, I really like the AppleTV. It's a solid product for me.
 
itouch rulz said:
I think lots of problems you read about here are with streaming. If you have a 160G+ collection of media surely you can just sync a 160G portion at a time and swap it out as needed - like you do with an iphone? Just a thought.
Click to expand...

I like the way mine (3 of them) are doing this automatically. For example, I ripped all my Stargate DVD's in one big go (my new i7 made this worthwhile!) and it synched as many as it had room for. Now, as I watch them, it removes them one by one, adding future episodes in their place, on all 3 of them. Whilst it's impressive, it doesn't really matter since it streams fine anyway. It's just all so wonderfully seamless and integrated, I love it.

I just wish Apple would give us some kind of iTunes and iPhoto server to run this system from. As it is, I have the media stored on a network drive, but when one Mac stores new stuff to it, the others don't know. And when the Apple TV's add new stuff only the synched Mac knows about it. I want a Mac Mini running the media and sharing to all the Mac's and Apple TV's.
 
mattwolfmatt said:
After experiencing many ATV issues - and eventually trading it in for a mac mini media center (best move I've made) - I'm curious: does Apple TV work for everyone, all the time? Ok, that's a rather high bar, how about, one issue a month?

After switching from PC to Mac about 3 years ago, I was amazed that Macs really did "just work" like they say. I had maybe one issue every few months, but a simple restart did the trick. Nothing like the horrible daily headache of PC world.

However, after what I've experienced, and reading others' experiences, I am curious if anyone has any perfect experiences. If so, please explain how you got to that euphoric state (I'm guessing your library is hard wired to the Apple TV).
Click to expand...


Sure Does and this latest update seems to have made it a bit more snappy.
 
masteroflondon said:
I just wish Apple would give us some kind of iTunes and iPhoto server to run this system from. As it is, I have the media stored on a network drive, but when one Mac stores new stuff to it, the others don't know. And when the Apple TV's add new stuff only the synched Mac knows about it. I want a Mac Mini running the media and sharing to all the Mac's and Apple TV's.
Click to expand...

A big +1 on this point. :)

I had a lot of problems playing music from iTunes through my Apple TV due to the wireless signal constantly dropping. Oddly I've never had a problem streaming video to the Apple TV but I've fixed it by going to a wired connection.

I've also hacked it so I can directly access my network drive and allow me to play ripped DVD movies, though I'd prefer a neater solution from Apple. The hacking community has shown the potential for this thing, it just needs Apple to put a lot more effort into it and make it a really great product.
 
masteroflondon said:
I just wish Apple would give us some kind of iTunes and iPhoto server to run this system from. As it is, I have the media stored on a network drive, but when one Mac stores new stuff to it, the others don't know. And when the Apple TV's add new stuff only the synched Mac knows about it. I want a Mac Mini running the media and sharing to all the Mac's and Apple TV's.
Click to expand...

Absolututely agree! With a house full of Mac's, iPhones, ATV, Airport's, and inevitably iPad's at some point, we need a seemless way to access iTunes, Aperture, iMovie, etc, media for playback and editing.
 
Mine is running 2.2.1 still because I like the way it looks and it's much faster. I downgraded from 3.0... I hated it.
 
Never had any problems here. Connected to an AEBS via ethernet.

A number of people seem to have trouble via wifi. Maybe the new 3.0.2 update will improve things in that regard.
 
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