ATV sync with iTunes stops half way through

Question

I purchased a movie on AppleTV and it downloaded fine to the AppleTV. When I opened iTunes on my Computer it began to sync and copied about 50% of the movie across onto iTunes then stopped.
I have tried any number of times and it always does the same thing, stops 50% of the way through, so there's no copy on iTunes.
I'm afraid that if I do a full reset on the AppleTV, I'll lose the movie and as its not on iTunes, I'll never see it again.
Any Suggestions?

Answer 1

Have had similar problems for months but (fingers crossed) appear to have fixed it in the last couple of days.
Windows XP running iTunes 9.0.2
BT Home hub router
ATV firmware 3.0.1
Three ATVs, one connected wirelessly (close to router), one connected via ethernet cable, one connected wirelessly (long distance from router). Laptop running iTunes is connected wirelessly.
The first two ATVs worked fine, however the long distance wireless ATV would appear in iTunes for a couple of minutes, begin syncing and then permanently disappear. Restarting iTunes had no affect. Only rebooting the ATV would bring it back and then it would disappear after a couple of minutes again. When the ATV was not displayed in iTunes it still had an internet connection and could access the Apple Store, YouTube etc.
Each ATV and the laptop is assigned a static IP address via the router. The windows firewall has the following ports open for iTunes (TCP 3689, UDP 5353 and TCP 49152). I haven't seen 49152 mentioned anywhere else but on the odd occaission iTunes has produced an error message about this port being blocked.
Firstly, I don't believe the wireless signal strength displayed by the ATV. It always appears very strong but any laptop placed anywhere in the same room shows an almost negligable signal. I also noticed the ATV was regularly loosing it's connection with the router and then reconnecting. I installed some HomePlug (85Mb/s) mains Network adapters so the ATV had a better hard wired connection (although because of the distance this ran at about half speed). This improved the ATV connection with iTunes, it would now last around 60 minutes before it disconnected and needed rebooting (it was roughly the same length of time, every time).
I finally ran an ethernet cable directly from the router to the ATV and all the problems went away. The troublesome ATV immediately transfered two movies to iTunes which then transferred them to the other ATVs while iTunes transferred a further 300 songs onto the troublesome ATV. I finally have all three ATVs with a consistant connection with iTunes. No matter what order I turn the PC or ATVs off and on, connections are always reestablished and permanent.
Could the issue be the quality of the network connection?
I have since updated the ATVs to firmware 3.0.2 without any problems. I am reluctant to update iTunes to v9.0.3 as others have recently reported on this forum that it has caused previously funtioning ATVs to loose their connections.