Home share connection constantly dropping

Question

When it works, my second generation Apple TV works very well. Unfortunately the 'home sharing' connection with my Mac is quite unstable - it regularly loses the connection, sometimes after waking from sleep, sometimes in the middle of films I'm streaming over, and sometimes for no obvious reason at all. Sometimes it sees my iTunes library but claims it contains nothing, at other times it sees the library but generates an error when I try to open it. This all adds up to an increasingly tedious series of home sharing restarts and reboots.
Does anyone have any ideas? The situation seems to have gotten significantly worse since the recent firmware update.

Answer 1

My guess would be an issue with your network especially if it's a wi-fi connection.
This could be due to interference from competing networks, router settings, microwave ovens/cordless landline phones, faulty router or faulty AppleTV.
Try setting the Mac and AppleTV not to sleep at all - if it's still an issue this would all point to the network losing connection with AppleTV rather than either AppleTV/Mac sleep issues (neither of which should really affect things mid film as the AppleTV will try to buffer the whole film over the local network, won't go to sleep itself and it's unlikely the Mac will have gone to sleep while sending a stream to AppleTV).