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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

Basic Setup Advanced Routing

Wireless

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dd-wrt main router

Setup

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Wireless

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  • I'd want to make absolutely certain that everything is on the same subnet, and that Wifi and Ethernet have comparable routing before concluding that it's not supported. Are you sure that Bonjour can work across the wired net? TBH, I've found Home Sharing a bit flakey even on Wifi, and it sometimes says it can't find my computer, and I have to restart the box, or restart sharing on the Mac.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Sep 16 at 16:58
  • I can consistently get it to work over wifi to the main router. Everything is bridged, so everything should be on the same subnet. Maybe someone with a more modern model can confirm whether or not home sharing works over ethernet. I don't see a technical reason it can't, but then again the Apple Find My feature only works when wifi is enabled (doesn't have to be connected, just enabled. Thanks Apple.)
    – Jeff Tillwick
    Commented Sep 16 at 22:54
  • I can confirm that ethernet is not the issue. I can't imagine what is causing my repeaters to block ONLY Apple home sharing. Literally everything else works. Netflix, Xbox Live, Web browsing, etc.
    – Jeff Tillwick
    Commented Sep 17 at 1:31

2 Answers 2

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I don’t see an official troubleshooting document other than Apple says connect all devices to the same network, so I would check your repeater tech specs to ensure they don’t filter traffic or set up a different network.

From Apple enterprise network considerations here are ports I would check in your wireless network to ensure they all are passing freely.

554 TCP/UDP Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) 2326 rtsp AirPlay, streaming media players

3689 TCP Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) — daap iTunes Music Sharing, AirPlay

5350 UDP NAT Port Mapping Protocol Announcements — — Bonjour

5351 UDP NAT Port Mapping Protocol — nat-pmp Bonjour

5353 UDP Multicast DNS (MDNS) 3927 mdns

Since you get this to work on Ethernet, you can rule out firewall issues on the sharing computer. Good work there avoiding a large number of additional things to check or configure.

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  • I updated my question with my network setup in as much detail as I can give. I don't know how any ports would be getting blocked.
    – Jeff Tillwick
    Commented Sep 17 at 4:35
  • Super updates @JeffTillwick - I just don’t know enough about repeater implementation and wonder if you ran a temporary Ethernet cable between the network devices you could avoid the “using the 5GHz radios for repeater communication and the 2.4Ghz for connected devices” clearly all the traffic isn’t being passed bidirectionally. Hopefully you don’t need to sniff the UDP broadcasts to isolate what is needed to connect
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Sep 17 at 6:47
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I solved my own issue. It is directly related to the 5GHz wifi radio in the hardware I'm using for my access point, which is a Archer C7 version 2.0. Using the original firmware I was unable to access Home Sharing over the 5GHz wifi at all. After installing dd-wrt the issue persisted. I ended up just trying random things until I finally found something that works. Under the advanced settings for the 5GHz wifi, I enabled a setting for Override Chipset Restrictions.

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After doing this and rebooting the Access Point I am now able to access Home Sharing on all of the repeaters.

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