That said I’m running two Apple TVs in our house and love watching almost everything on demand and without commercials these days. (My wife and I just finished watching Season 2 and 3 of Heroes going for 4-5 episodes in a row each evening – it’s fantastic experiencing such a brilliant TV series like a full-length movie.)

A couple of weeks ago when trying to push new content to one of our Apple TVs we occasionally ran into this much hated much reported issue with iTunes stating:

“The Apple TV is not responding. Check that any firewall software running on this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689.”

We are running iTunes 9.0.2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and the latest 3.0.1 Apple TV firmware.

With iTunes 9 Apple introduced Home sharing, allowing machines running iTunes to connect to each others and (automatically) sync content purchased from the iTunes Store.

The only thing that permanently solved the problem here was to disconnect all other machines, that connected to the iTunes instance which we used for syncing.

Whenever we ran into the above problem, which is wrongly reported as a possible firewall issue, we simply closed iTunes 9 on all other machines and the syncing worked like a charm. No reboot required!

As we got quite angry desperate with Apple, we thought we put our solution out here at the end of this year so it might be of help to others.

Neither is this an official fix, nor do we know whether it works in all cases. Should, however, it have helped you, we would love if you leave a note in the comments.