I have old and unsupported Apple TV gen 2 and 3 devices hooked up to 2 of my TVs. I know they are old but they still work fine for my purposes.
Connected using Wifi directly to my main router, I am able to access my media collection hosted on my Mac, using Apple Home Sharing, from both Apple TVs just fine.
I recently wanted to reduce the Wifi footprint in my home, so I got 2 Wifi repeaters and placed them in the 2 rooms with the TVs. I hooked up each TV, game consoles and the Apple TVs to each repeater using ethernet cables. Everything works great. The game consoles connect online and have no problems in multiplayer games. The TV can access the network and everything appears to work there. Both Apple TVs allow me to connect to iTunes to rent movies or purchase or listen to music, however when I try to access the Computers tile on the main menu, which uses Apple Home Sharing, nothing appears. I get an error message saying that there is no shared library. If I unplug the ethernet cable and it reconnects to wifi, suddenly the media library shows up just fine.
The repeaters have a 4 port switch built in and are setup in bridge mode with the gateway set to the main router (192.168.1.1). All security options and service options (upnp, etc) are turned off on the repeaters. IPv6 is turned off on the main router and all of the repeaters.
I know I can simply just keep the Apple TVs in wifi mode and be just fine…
However, I want to know what is going on here. Why doesn’t Apple Home Sharing work with an ethernet connection? I don’t have any of the Apple TV 4k models to test, so I’m not even sure is this issue is limited to the gen 2 and 3 or not. Is there anyone that can shed light on what is going on or how to fix it? Thanks.
Edit I confirmed that it is not the ethernet connection, but the repeaters causing the issue. I connected the Apple TVs directly to my main router with ethernet and home sharing works fine.
So, some network configuration is blocking the home sharing from working using repeaters. I can’t imagine what.
Edit 2
I added an Archer C7 v2 running dd-wrt in wifi repeater mode. Exact same issue. I also tried an Archer C7 v5 with stock firmware as the main access point with the same result. I tried a Archer C7 v2 with dd-wrt as the main access point and I have the exact same issue with it. Below is my configuration for the dd-wrt repeater. Everything not shown is either turned off (dnsmasq, spi firewall, upnp, port forwarding, etc) or default. Both are using WPA2 AES with the same key. I’m using the 5GHz radios for repeater communication and the 2.4Ghz for connected devices.
dd-wrt repeater
Setup
Wireless
dd-wrt main router
Setup
Wireless
