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Problem with iTunes dropping AppleTV

J

jersey10

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 20, 2004
100
0
I have two AppleTVs that I have been using, without problems, for the past year. Recently, however, the AppleTVs will show up in iTunes whenever I first open it, but after a while they disappear from iTunes. When this happens, I can no longer play anything which has not already been synced to the AppleTV (I will instead get a message that the "selected video could not be played. The format was not recognized."). If I close iTunes and reopen it, the AppleTVs will show up again, but again only for a little while.

Has anyone else had this same problem and/or know how to prevent it?

Thanks for your help.
 
Yep, I have had similar problems ever since updating Leopard to 10.5.7 (I have a thread in this sub-forum). I have not found a fix, and have basically given up. Wish I could point you in the right direction....
 
I've had the same problem. I just did a factory reset, and it seems better now. We'll see. APple MUST stop giving us the old line about interference when youtube and the trailers work fine. It's an itunes problem, most likely.
 
I have this problems too.

I quit and relaunch iTunes and it finds the Apple TV again. They need a rescan command like in the Airport Utility, for when iTunes forgets about the Apple TV. So you can force iTunes to find it again.
 
I just got a second ATV and this is happening more and more. I had one downstairs in our living room. It would occassionally drop off of itunes if I didn't use it for a while. Not a major problem. When it did work, it was a great device.

Then 3 weeks ago I got one for our bedroom which is upstairs (a few rooms down from our mac/modem/wireless router. Now the downstairs one keeps dropping off. All the time. It will show up when I reboot the downstairs ATV and re start itunes but then it will shortly drop off again.

This is a real pain. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with multiple ATV's since that's when my problem seemed to start.
 
I took mine off of wireless and hooked it up with an ethernet cable. Problem went away. Haven't had a single problem with this again and it's been months.
 
jersey10 said:
I am hooked up via ethernet cable and still having the problem.
Click to expand...

I tried connecting via ethernet when this problem first popped-up after 10.5.7, and it didn't resolve anything for me. I am totally clueless what happened; makes no sense to me how updating Leopard to .7 could cause this, and I can't find others who had this problem only after updating Leo like me.
 
I have same problem--recently started

i stream most of my content from itunes on a mac mini thru ATV
my itunes content is served off an external glyph 750 drive
until recently occasional bugs--nothing major--but now pretty much itunes drops ATV (or vise versa?) every day.
incredibly annoying
bummed to see no solutions discovered and cluelessness from apple :0
so, no what?
btw--my system is hardwired so cant be wireless issue as some have thought above...
 
I moved to a hardwired solution last year when trying to solve various problems with ATV and have recently had this issue. The quickest and most reliable way of fixing it seems to be to do a restore on the box.

The usual things of reloading iTunes, rebooting Mac, rebooting ATV etc just don't seem to fix it unfortunately.
 
Slightly different, but still no connection.
I have to enter the password for the wireless every day. Didn't do this before.
 
iTunes STILL dropping AppleTVs

Has anyone ever solved this problem of iTunes dropping AppleTV???? This continues to be a problem with both my AppleTV, both the one connected via Ethernet cable and the one connected wirelessly. I was hoping the recent iTunes update would solve it but it did not.

Has anyone solved this problem?

Why won't Apple issue an update which deals with this major bug that many people have to deal with?

My two AppleTVs worked wonderfully for the first year or so I had them, but this problem makes them incredibly frustrating.

Thanks.
 
I was having the same problem on both my ATV's. I was running NetBarrier on my iMac where iTunes was at. NetBarrier was blocking the IP for the two ATV's seeing them as ping flood threats. I disabled NetBarrier and everything worked fine. I added the two IP's as safe and have not had the issue since. It might be worth checking if you have a firewall or anti-virus running to see if that is causing the grief.
 
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have anything of that sort running. My Apple TVs were running perfectly for over a year until this problem developed several months ago. It's annoying that Apple is ignoring the problem, which many have been dealing with for some time now.
 
I had this problem....then it seemed to have fixed it with the last ATV update. Worked fine for like 2 weeks. Now both mine are dropping like crazy all the time.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.19.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.2 Safari/530.19)

I had it, but put me in the "it just went away" crowd (for now) -touch wood and all that).



I heard about this issue a lot, but never had it. Then, all of a sudden it happened every few minutes. I went and tried whole bunch of suggestions from different forums, and somewhere in the middle of that, it just got better.



I can't even say anything I changed was responsible for fixing it. I tried a few things, it wasn't getting better so I went ot bed thinking I would try other things on my list tomorrow, and by the time I got back to it, it was fine.



What I did do was change the IP (on my wired AppleTV) to static instead of DHCP. I also changed the lease-life of DHCP devices to something stupid like 30 days (for my wireless AppleTV).



I also installed the latest AppleTV software that came out around that time, as well as the iTunes .2 that also came out around the same time. I also installed the Airport Express firmware that I had been avoiding doing since the update previous to that broke my old router.



So, I don't know which of these things fixed my problem, but so far, it's running smoothly.


Edited to add: I made some router config changes, too, but I can't recall exactly what. I was going to kill my "Guest Network" as my next tryme, but I never needed to.

In case it helps anyone, my setup is:

iTunes Library on Drobo FW 800 running to iTunes on an Intel iMac.
AppleTV #1: Ethernet
AppleTV #2: N Wireless
Router: AEBS G/N dual-band with a guest network enabled. I'm not running a "closed" network for my wireless (which I've seen blamed for this issue -no idea how accurate that is though, I just read it on a forum).
 
Does the latest Itunes version correct this issue?

Here are the release notes (see second para.):

About iTunes 8.2.1

iTunes 8.2 now supports iPhone or iPod touch with the iPhone 3.0 Software Update. iTunes 8.2 also includes many accessibility improvements and bug fixes.

iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.
 
The latest iTunes update did NOT fix the problem for me. Still drops both my AppleTVs every time. Makes an otherwise wonderful product an amazingly frustrating experience.
 
Yikes! I was really thinking of picking one up...but was torn w/o 1080p support....after reading this thread I think I'll pass. I'll wait for a Sept update and if that doesn't come I'll consider a Mini or other options. Lacie has a Cinema drive that will play anything.
 
Still Dropping

AppleTV not showing up in iTunes on my MacBook

Am able to use iPod touch to control aTv so the atv is on my network.

Also can stream from my windows laptop to atv

But no synching/streaming from my MacBook

Very frustrating
:mad: :mad: :mad:
 
I was having the same issues as the OP. I noticed with the update to 10.5.8 the problem is no longer happening.

I thought I would throw that out there for others still having the problem.
 
Welll...I'm really confused now... Out of the blue, a couple weeks ago, I stopped having problems w/ ATV dropping out of iTunes devices list. I delayed upgrading iTunes to 8.2.1 because I didn't want to risk having the problem re-occur.. Then, Leopard 10.5.8 was released. I updated through Software Update, but I forgot to uncheck upgrading iTunes...so iTunes 8.2.1 was installed.. Now, ATV drops out of iTunes....again!!! Ugh, this makes zero sense to me...
 
I've had all of the same problems as above but it works just fine if I do two of the following:

  • Make everything run wirelessly (macbook, iphone & apple tv).
  • Make everything run through ethernet apart from the iphone (seems if the macbook can see the apple tv in itunes the apple iphone has no problems either while it is connected wirelessly.

I wanted to have the macbook wireless and the apple tv wired but this caused no ends of apple tv disappearing from itunes only sometimes coming back after restarts & re-syncs.
 
Yeah, I've been having this problem, too. It's GOT to be a Leopard issue because everything was fine until I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Upgrading to the latest iTunes and the latest Leopard haven't helped. AppleTV just randomly disappears from the Devices list in iTunes.

But today I noticed something new -- just as AppleTV randomly disappears, sometimes it also randomly REappears, without me having to do anything. Is anyone else experiencing this?
 
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