There are few things in life that give me greater pleasure than finally solving a tech problem in my house that’s been plaguing me for months.
This time, it was my Apple TV. Despite what most people have been saying about the Apple TV over the years, I still think it’s a tremendously cool product. And I don’t agree with critics who think it needs various software and hardware changes to make it more successful. Personally, I still think the only thing Apple TV needs is something Apple can’t provide on its own: More content. But that’s a discussion for another day. Today, I’m just happy my Apple TV is working properly again. The problem? Well, it was one of those things that several people seem to be experiencing, and yet no one really had a solution that worked, until very recently. In a nutshell, my iTunes lost track of the Apple TV every few hours, despite it being plugged in via Ethernet to the same router. It would simply disappear from the iTunes source list. Since I generally stream all of my content from the home Mac mini, rather than trying to predict the content I’m going to want to watch later and synching it to the Apple TV’s hard drive, that meant that just about every time I went to watch something on the Apple TV, it wouldn’t be able to play anything. The shows and movies were all listed there, as if it were still in communication with the mini, but when I tried to play anything, I’d get the dreaded “cannot play this file type” message, which is Apple TV speak for “I really could play this file, if I just knew where it was.”
After downgrading and upgrading both my operating system and my iTunes several times, wiping the Apple TV and starting over several times, adjusting dozens of network settings that I still don’t quite understand several times, nothing seemed to help the situation. Was it due to the fact that my media files were all stored on an external Drobo? Was there some other network interference from some other wireless network in range of my house?
I could quit and restart iTunes on my mini to get it working again, but this was the very definition of a kludge. The whole point of using the Apple TV instead of the mini for my entertainment was that I wanted the absolute simplest ease of use. Logging into the mini (it’s a server with no keyboard or mouse hooked up to it) from my MacBook Pro and quitting and restarting a program was not something that I was prepared to accept as a nightly ritual just to watch some reruns of the Sopranos. (Yes, I have all six seasons in my iTunes, and yes, I still enjoy watching that show.)
Even now, I have no idea why this problem started; after all, my Apple TV worked for years with the same setup until a couple of months ago. But I am glad I finally got it fixed, thanks to someone who was kind enough to post his solution on Apple’s Discussion Support Forums.
Here’s what fixed it: A change to manually assigned permanent IP addresses for both the mini and the Apple TV. My laptops and my iPhones still grab whatever number the router assigns them through DHCP. But for those two devices, I chose numbers outside of the range of the DHCP server and entered them manually.
So now, the Apple TV stays connected to my iTunes. It’s been several days now with no issues. And it feels good. And I still say the Apple TV is a great product. I just wish Apple didn’t have such a hard time licensing more content from the major networks and movie studios. And it would be nice if they figured out what was going on with this networking issue, and posted an official fix.
