Hello -
Has anyone gotten Home Sharing to work on your FIOS network? I have a laptop on the wireless network with an iTunes library of about 100GB of music, and I have an iPad3 (new iPad) that I want to stream music to via the FIOS wireless network. According to Apple it should be as simple as activating Home sharing on the laptop and connecting the iPad to the Home sharing network. I was able to get the iPad to connect to the wireless network no problem and it sees the laptop via Home Sharing and a "Shared" button appears on the iPad which allows the selection of music from the laptop. The issue I am having is on the iPad the "Shared" button shows up intermittently. When its there it works great but it never stays on. Sleep mode is disabled on the laptop incidentally. Apple says its a FIOS issue and told me to buy a Netgear router. That to me is a completely unacceptable answer. I have logged calls to both Verizon and Actiontec about this issue, they both tried to help but no luck. It's definitely something with that Actiontec router but have no idea at this point. Is there anything that needed to be done with the Actiontec router to get it working?? Is it something else? If you have this working I would love to hear how you got it working!! Thank you in advance!
I believe the Apple Home Sharing software uses the Bonjour platform from Apple. That is Multicast-based (mDNS). By any chance if you look in the Advanced Options within the router, do you see any options for Multicast? It might be a consideration to enable that to see if it helps any.
Do you have any media devices which support DLNA? Devices such as PS3s and DLNA servers on computers can block Bonjour from working correctly.
Also, if Bonjour/Media Sharing works like it does on the crappy PC version of iTunes, iTunes might need to be open for it to work unless Home Sharing runs as a service on the Mac.
It's working for me ... but then I have a TimeCapsule running in transparent mode which I use as my wireless access point in the house instead of the wireless on the ActionTec. I do recall some spotty service with it early on when I had some older access points in use (depended on which access point I associated with), so there might be some validity to the mDNS/Bonjour stuff being spotty on the ActionTec depending on how it handles multicast traffic.
Just for clarification ... iTunes on the Mac needs to be running (light on below the icon) but it doesn't need to be open on the desktop and you can set it so that it automatically launches at login. Keep in mind also that if the server goes to sleep, that iTunes is not running and thus you won't see the service.
The solution can be found here:
Home sharing uses the airplay API. If you want to stream (and I'm not sure why you would need this because iTunes music is in the cloud now) iTunes media from your MacBook to your iPad (the new iPad) then you will require an Apple TV, or a time capsule, or an AirPort Extreme to serve as a bridge. iOS 6 and airplayV2 is rumored to mitigate the requirement for a hardware broadcaster.
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