The other day I decided for the first time to turn on iTunes Home Sharing, imagine my surprise to discover I could watch everything in my iTunes library with out syncing it to my iPad (at least when I am at home). Since I only have a 16GB iPad this saves me a lot of trips to the computer to sync.
Seemed like it should be easy enough, enable home sharing, and sign in to iTunes and the iPad with the same Apple ID. Of course it wasn’t that easy.
The first problem was when I would start iTunes the iPad would see the shared library for about a minute then it would disappear until iTunes was restarted, when it would show up again for a minute.
I solved this problem by adding two rules to the Windows Firewall (Windows 7 Home Premium)
Allow Incoming on TCP port 3689
Allow Incoming on UDP port 5353
Not really sure I should have had to do this manually, but since I added these rules, the shared library shows up consistently and plays back videos just fine.
Now that I was able to see my shared library, I found a second problem. The videos was all displaying the wrong names and wrong artwork, so you never knew exactly what video you were selecting. A quick search revealed that this is apparently a very common problem. I followed the steps in this thread in the Apple discussion forums, which fixed my movies, but TV shows are still all wrong (both the Show/Season name and the artwork).
I am continuing to search for a fix, any suggestions are welcome. I am not impressed with iTunes Home Sharing so far, it does not “just work”.
Links
Well known TCP and UDP ports used by Apple Software products