Home Sharing was fine, now "broken" under iOS 5 and/or iTunes 10.6

Question

Both my Apple TVs (one is last year's 720p model, one is the recent 1080p model) drop the Home Sharing connection with the iTunes Library on my Mac. After some idle time and for no reason at all, selecting "Computer" on either aTV will result in the display "Loading [name of iTunes Library]" for a long time with the spinning wheel, then finally stop and return to the home screen. Sometimes there is an error message and sometimes there isn't. Only turning Home Sharing off and then back on on the Mac "fixes" this, but only temporarily.
I can't pinpoint if this started with iTunes 10.6 (10.6.1 did not help), or iOS 5.0 on the aTV. I can say that under iTunes 10.5.x and with the older aTV on iOS 4.x, there were zero problems. I have not since changed my home network, nor my Mac, so this is not a hardware problem on my end. Something in either iTunes 10.6.x or aTV iOS 5.x is causing this failure in Home Sharing.
Any "fixes" or work-arounds to try while we wait for Apple to fix this one? (I have already submitted two bug reports, one under iTunes, one under Apple TV.)

Answer 1

I got pretty tired of getting up and resetting my itunes every time I wanted to watch something on AppleTV or listen to music via the remote app, so I wrote a little ruby app to restart itunes when home sharing breaks.  I noticed that the TCP port 3689 times out when this problem occurs, so I just test to see if that socket will open, if it doesn't, I send commands to close and launch itunes.
The way I figure, this will never interrupt me because I only use this instance of itunes when I'm on appletv or using my remote.  If home sharing is timing out, it means I'm not in the middle of doing one of those things.
Ruby code:
require 'socket'
def is_port_open?(ip, port)
  begin
    TCPSocket.new(ip, port)
  rescue Errno::ECONNREFUSED
    return false
  end
  return true
end
while true
  unless is_port_open?("127.0.0.1", 3689)
    puts "Home sharing is broken.  I am going to restart iTunes. #{Time.now}"
    `osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to quit'`
    sleep 10
    `open -a iTunes`
    sleep 30
    puts "iTunes restarted"
  end
  sleep 5
end
If you want a simple way to run this script and are not too comfortable around the command line, I've posted it to amazon S3.  You can just launch a terminal as the user that runs itunes and copy/paste the following:
curl http://djw.s3.amazonaws.com/homesharing-keepalive.rb > ~/Documents/homesharing-keepalive.rb && chmod +x ~/Documents/homesharing-keepalive.rb
Then execute the following when you want to run it:
~/Documents/homesharing-keepalive.rb
If a timeout occurs, you will see something like this printed in the terminal (and itunes will restart):
Home sharing is broken.  I am going to restart iTunes. Mon Jun 04 15:35:28 -0400 2012
iTunes restarted
Keep the terminal minimized so this runs.  If you close it, it will kill the process.  You can also hit cntrl-c in the terminal to kill the script.  The following will remove it from your computer:
rm -f ~/Documents/homesharing-keepalive.rb
More advanced users can use screen or other ways to background the process so you don't need the terminal running (but I don't need to tell you that).
I've only been using this for 24 hours, but it seems to do the trick.
EDIT:  I should note that this is for OSX only.  You could do something very similar in windows, but this won't work.
Message was edited by: aut0maticdan