I went ahead and installed
DD-WRT on my router today. I want to give it a few days before I say this for certain, but I think it's solved all the problems I had with the Apple TV. I tried streaming stuff wirelessly from my MacBook to the Apple TV, and that worked. I watched a podcast and a couple of YouTube videos over the Internet, no problem. And I synced a few TV shows from my desktop PC down to the Apple TV without the sync getting interrupted and restarting every few minutes.
The install was fairly straightforward. For a v8 WRT54G like mine, it's detailed
here. It turns out that the v8 WRT54G isn't the best router to user for DD-WRT (that would probably be a
WRT54GL, as explained
here), but it works with with the "micro" distribution of DD-WRT, which is all I really need.
The installation write-up doesn't bother to mention the default user name and password for DD-WRT. You can find them in the
FAQ, but if you haven't looked that up and written it down before installing, you might have to do what I did, which was to call a friend and have him look it up for me.
Aside from the usual setup, I didn't have to mess with any of the parameters in DD-WRT to get things working well, except to turn off "filter multicast", which I had to do under the original firmware also. (That setting is under security / firewall in the DD-WRT config.)
Overall, DD-WRT is pretty cool. You can see a lot of stuff in the status screens that you can't see under the default firmware. And there's lot of stuff you can tweak, though I doubt I'll mess with it much, assuming it keeps working OK.
Labels: Apple, hardware