So, in order to ACTUALLY use my AppleTV the way Steve Jobs intended to, I had to fix some issues. The first and most annoying was… “Waiting for network services” whenever the damn thing felt like it.

FIX: Power cycle the AppleTV. (Disconnect it from the power supply, walk around for 5 minutes and then reconnect) This should force the AppleTV to do a hard reboot and work. Also, the next fix helped a LOT.

Second issue. Netflix kept saying something like “An error occurred loading this content. Try again later.” Of course, later wasn’t acceptable. Turns out that AppleTV gets cranky about DNSMasq and won’t work – you’ll have to set DNS manually. (If you’re behind a DD-WRT router, you’re using DNSMasq)

FIX: Go to Main Menu > Settings > General > Network > Configure TCP/IP. Select manually, leave the IP alone, subnet alone and change DNS to 008.008.008.008 (Actually, 8.8.8.8 but that interface is a pain in the ass.) This makes the AppleTV skip the router altogether and use Google’s public DNS server.

FIX 2: Disable DNSMasq altogether in your ddwrt configuration page. Updating to ddwrt svn15230 seemed to help on my WRT160Nv3 router; have yet to try it on my WRT400Nv1.

Using both of these fixes made my AppleTV work and I’ve been watching movies all day long. Yay!

For those that are interested, my current network layout is: AppleTV -> WRT160N/WRT400N Router -> VyprVPN -> Internet.