ATV stalls on sync...much frustration ensues...

[benobo]

Doing some media house-cleaning, and I just finished the process of shifting all my movies from an external hard drive to my iMac, and reloading everything into iTunes. This means my ATV has to re-sync everything, but now when it tries to it just stalls at the first movie.

I've given the ATV a factory reset, rebooted iMac...not quite sure what else could be wrong. There were no issues with the initial sync...

I'm using an airport express as the modem. The best advice I've found so far was to reboot the modem, and while that worked for a little while (ATV moved about 30 movies over...took nearly 12 hours -- way longer than the initial sync -- but hey!) now it's back to being stalled.

Anyone have any advice they can offer? I've scoured the forums and so far, no luck...The ATV is streaming video fine. Just not syncing.

Could this be a network problem? Should I be port-mapping for the ATV somehow?

Your collective wisdom and guidance is appreciated...

Ben

 

[Mr Kram]

in my experience, the atv seems to "time out" when trying to sync a large amount of content wirelessly. it could be that i have a crowded network and that i'm running an N/B/G hybrid. i don't know the answer for this.

however, whenever i have to sync more than a movie or two, i just hook it up via ethernet directly to my imac which houses the itunes library. it works like a charm and it does the job about 25x faster at the very least.

 

[benobo]

in my experience, the atv seems to "time out" when trying to sync a large amount of content wirelessly. it could be that i have a crowded network and that i'm running an N/B/G hybrid. i don't know the answer for this.

however, whenever i have to sync more than a movie or two, i just hook it up via ethernet directly to my imac which houses the itunes library. it works like a charm and it does the job about 25x faster at the very least.

Thanks for the tip. I tried to sync things using the ethernet cable but it wouldn't for some reason. iTunes "saw" the aTV but came back with an error message when I pressed sync. I've read mention of a specific cable needed so maybe that was the issue...my firewall is pretty well completely open.

That's the timeout issue, though. What about when it won't sync from the get-go? Anyone?

 

[jaw04005]

I don't think you need a crossover because both the Mac and Apple TV have auto-sensing Ethernet jacks.

I would go into Settings -> Computer and remove all your iTunes libraries from both syncing and streaming.

Then, I would restart the Apple TV and iTunes on your iMac. Once the Apple TV reboots, I would re-pair the two devices. They should now be able to communicate together properly.

 

[EMC2009]

I ran into a similar issue. I resolved it by syncing only parts of my library initially, before syncing all of it. The gradual ramp up seemed to help. I started with syncing music (the smallest part), then movies, then photos (the largest part). This seemed to resolve the issue for me. Hope it helps.