Fixing Slow Apple TV

We use two Apple TVs at the school to publish student projects. They provide a wonderful, interactive mechanism for accessing student work in the lobbies. However, not everything, even at Apple, always works as described.

One great feature of Apple TV is the ability to stream music from your iTunes library to your Apple TV.

What Apple, and any discussion forums, fail to mention is that this "feature" can often present the symptoms of a bug. In particular, depending on your Apple TV network connection (ethernet 100/1000, wireless g/n), the size of your iTunes library, and the content you're accessing, the streaming feature may in fact cause video to stutter and pause, or the remote to become unresponsive.

Don't despair, the solution is a check-box away. If your Apple TV is unresponsive enable the "Show only the synced items on my Apple TV" under the "Summary" tab of your Apple TV in iTunes.

This is a good news/bad news solution: you will be limited to playing only content stored on the Apple TV's internal hard drive, however, it will work.

Setting up prudent smart lists and clever syncing will give you all the dynamically changing content you want, even with the 40 GB drive, and help you avoid the perils of a slow or altogether unresponsive Apple TV.

Think of this setting as a mocha-java skinny-latte cappuccino for your Apple TV.