There’s a long-running issue that I’ve encountered when trying to play music on my Apple TV. I have the music on my Mac in iTunes and I want to play it using AirPlay on my Apple TV which is hooked up by ethernet. Often when picking the AirPlay menu in iTunes I’ll get a box saying something like “Connecting to Apple TV,” but it never connects. This piece on TUAW suggests the issue involves IPv6 but the instructions on their fix seem outdated post-Mountain Lion.

Today I was talking to Apple support about an unrelated issue and then asked them about this. Their suggestion sounds dumb but worked: turn off (unplug) the Apple TV, wait two minutes, plug in the ethernet cord, plug in the Apple TV. Now I can AirPlay just fine, for the moment at least.

The issue apparently is that the Apple TV doesn’t switch ports as gracefully as the Mac does, so it’ll get confused sometimes if it sees a wireless network but also has an ethernet cord plugged in.

Update: Well, it worked for a while but now the “Connecting…” popup stays there again and doesn’t resolve.