Another user who can't use an Apple TV

Question

After much anticipation I managed to get my hands on an Apple TV 2 days ago. Unfortunately, I seemed to have joined the club of folks who can't seem to get their Apple TVs up and running (see elsewhere on this forum, e.g. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12471381). The story goes like this...
1. Apple TV connects to my wifi, but then sits on the "Waiting for network services..." screen with pin wheel indefinitely (I waited for over 6 hours, periodically knocking the screensaver off, making sure it didn't go to sleep).
2. Pressing the menu button while it was failing to connect would take me to the main menu. Movie thumbnails were visible and I could watch previews. Couldn't connect to youtube but I could connect to my MobileMe gallery.
3. Couldn't activate home sharing as it claimed my iTunes Store username/password were invalid. This isn't the case as the same username/password combination work fine on my other machines (an iMac, two MacBooks and an iPhone). To be double sure I updated my account details to have a password with more than 8 characters including a number and a combination of uppercase/lowercase) and checked my c/card details were up to date. Still no joy. So, I can't connect to my iTunes library to watch video or listen to audio (making the ATV a bit pointless).
4. Having read all the discussion of this on the forums (and the Apple trouble shooting guides) I've tried the following
- making sure all ports are open on my router (especially the relevant ports for NTP etc)
- checking the network traffic was OK (all my devices are able to get network time OK, use Home Sharing withing the LAN, connect to the iTunes store etc)
- Updating to iTunes 10.0.1
- Turning off/on home sharing on my iMac
- Restarting my machines
- Restarting my router
- pulling my hair out
5. I called apple support who were useless. This was a real blow. In the past, I've always found Apple support to be brilliant, but today the guy I spoke to couldn't get me off the phone fast enough. All he wanted to do was email me a link to the support page, even though I had already told him that I had spent two days working through these!!! Totally useless. This is a real shame since the support was one of the reasons to choose Apple. If I wan't bad service, I'd have bought a Dell.
6. I returned the ATV to the Apple Store. Unfortunately, they were unable/unwilling to test it in the store but offered me an exchange or a refund. In the end I left with a new unit. Unfortunately this has not solved the problem - exactly the same result with the new unit.
So where am I left? Two units won't work in my home, so it's unlikely to be a faulty unit. I tried my router wide open (allowing all incoming/outgoign traffic) so I don't see that being the problem. My ISP (Plusnet in the UK) clearly isn't blocking the required ports as my other machines (using the same Netgear DGN2000 ADSL wireless router) seem to be able to use these ports/services just fine.
I can see that some would take the above as evidence that my network is to blame. However, all the tests I can do suggest that my network and router are working perfectly well and that the ATV should also work. At the end of the day, if I went and bought an airport extreme (which costs 150% of the cost of the ATV) I'd still have to connect to my ISP though my router since the airport extreme isn't an ADSL router. Frankly, I resent having to buy new routers just to test to see if the ATV will work. The kit I have meets the industry standards to the ATV should work!!
The replacement ATV is going back to the store for a refund this week, unless anyone has a useful suggestion?

Answer 1

Alley_Cat - all good advice, thanks. Sadly, I've already tried most of your suggestions...
Alley_Cat wrote:
You seem to be partially connected to the internet, so AppleTV is seeing the that, it looks as though LAN communication is the issue.
Yes and no. As I understand it, Home Sharing verification is via the iTunes store, and my account wont verify, so there are still some WAN issues. "Partially connected" seems to be the right word!
Alley_Cat wrote:
I can't say I've ever seen 'waiting for network services', but had problems getting Home Sharing to work initially as it seemed to disable itself when I pressed 'Done' at the end of the enabling process in iTunes. Try disabling/enabling again and not pressing done just clicking movies or something in iTunes - if I didn't do this the Home Sharing icon kept disappearing.
I've seen this reported elsewhere on the forum. Tried not pressing "done" after activating Home Sharing, but still no connectivity
Alley_Cat wrote:
I would be tempted to configure your router to assign a fixed LAN IP address for AppleTV based on it's MAC address, then restart everything. Also try temporarily disabling any wi-fi security, can you then connect fully (you may have done this I think)?
If you have a long ethernet cable or ethernet connection is simple (nearby router, or direct to a local computer) try connecting that to the router to see if it's a wi-fi issue.
Yeah, already enabled all traffic, tried with both fixed IP and DHCP assigned IP, both wifi and wired, Also tried connecting via my iMac. Makes no difference
Alley_Cat wrote:
You can clearly connect in part to the internet, but it's odd you can access MobileMe, and not YouTube. It would be worth checking your ISP is not blocking anything or having issues - you've already sorted the router by the sounds of it.
I contacted my ISP, but this seems unlikely. All my other Apple devices seem to be able to communicated just fine over the internet.
Alley_Cat wrote:
On the Mac, things like NetBarrier, Little Snitch might block AppleTV if not configured to allow traffic. Temporarily disable software firewalls including OS X if you haven't done so.
Don't have any of this software (and the software firewalls are all turned off)
Alley_Cat wrote:
I can't remember at the minute if AppleTV 2 has an iTunes Store country setting (old one did) but if your store credentials are not being recognised it could be defaulting to the wrong country for some reason, and not set to UK. Another possibility is that the authentication happens via iTunes (I don't think it does in all honesty), so if AppleTV isn't seeing iTunes, it may not be able to authenticate and gives a vague error message.
Early ATV2 users noted that they had to change the country settings from US, but mine was shipped with UK already set.
Alley_Cat wrote:
This is obvious but I assume you are not inadvertently trying to enable Home Sharing with your MobileMe credentials - it could easily be done, but doubt your doing that. I also assume you don't have multiple itunes Store login names.
One final thing I would do before giving up is to create a dummy account and set up a new itunes library with a few things in it, enable Home Sharing etc again with this - if there's a configuration issue with the existing user's iTunes account, or some library corruption, the communication could be falling over as it encounters an error in the library it can't deal with (poor error handling in itunes or AppleTv code).
Always good to rule out user-stupidity!!! :o)
I've made sure I'm using the correct username/password combination for my iTunes account (this is different from my MobileMe account). I've also made sure that my password conforms to the requested standard (min 8 chars, at least 1 numeric, at least 1 uppercase, at least 1 lowercase, no spaces). I've also tried creating a new iTunes store account. Still no good.