Apple TV's Problems and Solutions

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It's more than two years since we have the apple TV. This was bought mainly for the mirroring of the iPAD and the iPhone. It was just secondarily meant for Netflix movies. As I am not really a diehard fan of apple, it's the missus and the kids who use it primarily. And they encountered problems which the trouble shooter in the house needs to solve. And here they are.

Apple devices can not sustain mirroring.

This problem arises from watching mirrored movies from any online websites. Symptom for this is, any device can connect and OK for the first minute then the connection drops. As the connection is by wi-fi, I thought restarting the router by turning on and off (plugging and unplugging it's adaptor) will be the solution.  I was also thinking of interference of other wi-fi devices but the problem still persisted after switching their  wi-fi buttons off. I found out clearing the cache of Safari from the mirrored device  is the best solution. If you are using other browsers, you need to clear them out as well.

Mirrored images have different color from the source.

I have experienced this "ghosting of images" before from SVGA connected devices, the images displayed at the playback screen have different color from the source. Sometimes the screen is flickering. This is no difference with the HDMI connection, which loosen from time to time caused by physically moving the apple tv or loosen connection from the HDMI port of the playback TV itself. Re tightening it up will immediately fix this. If it doesn't try other HDMI port from the TV. If the problem persists, then try another HDMI cable.

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This is a classic tale of my wife when the kids are finished with their games. Sometimes they mess up the HDMI ports on the telly or the HDMI cables on the devices when they bring in the living room their gaming console from the conservatory specially when it is too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer. A simple solution to this is to write a label on the TV's HDMI port to distinguish which one is which. Or you can just scroll down with the telly's menu to the list of the input source and try each one out.

No sound!

This actually made me panicked. One day there was no sound coming from a video using the built in Netflix application although the apple TV's system sound(the click sound it makes when you push a button on the apple's remote) is OK. I tried to play the same Netflix movie on the iPAD and the sound is alright. I ruled out Netflix is not the problem, or  my cables and my internet connection. It is the apple TV itself. My suspect on the apple TV became more obvious when I tried all the built in streaming sites within. They do not output a sound! 

The obvious and quickest solution for me at this point is to reset the unit into it's factory settings. But the thought of filling out the query box and long network key without a keyboard made me decide to investigate further.

Checking on the settings, I noticed that the time zone is set to Cuppertino and not London, and the regional setting is set to USA and not UK! After putting the correct information, the sound came back!