Author: scrooks

Making Apple TV And OpenDNS Play Nice

Apple TV / OpenDNS

The Apple TV is a great device for streaming TV and movies, particularly if you live in the world of an Apple ecosystem. OpenDNS is a great service for serving up fast DNS records. Unfortunately, they don’t get along.

If you don’t have both of these items, or you don’t even know what they are, this post is not for you. This post is for those who are having problems with the pairing and are lucky enough to be sent here by a search engine.

When OpenDNS and Apple TV are used together, sometimes starting a show on the Apple TV takes forever. Not quite literally forever, but so many hours that you give up and never watch your show. Have you had your Apple TV tell you your movie will be ready to watch in 6 hours? Do you use OpenDNS severs on your router? I can tell you how to fix it.

Not everyone seems to have this problem. It can also be sporadic. My Apple TV was slow when I first got it but then starting working well. I thought something got updated on the Apple TV or in the pipeline to fix it. It hummed along fine for a several months.

Then the slowness came back and it was horrible and it wouldn’t go away. I was extremely frustrated. It took some thinking and some digging and some experimenting, but I did conclusively confirm that OpenDNS was causing the problem. The technical details are unimportant. You’ve probably already read them somewhere else if you ended up here. Something about CDNs and being directed to one close enough and that not happening and causing major delays in your streams. What matters is that turning off OpenDNS and using your ISP’s DNS servers fixes the Apple TV.

But that sucks. OpenDNS is great. It speeds up your Internet access. It can block undesirable sites from your entire network. I didn’t want to turn it off just to make my Apple TV work.

But I did. For a while.

Then the solution hit me one day. It’s simple, but I never once saw this solution in any of the numerous sites I visited and read for hours while trying to get these things to play nicely together.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Find out the DNS server your ISP gives you by default. It should show up on your router if you don’t manually specify your own.
  2. Switch your router back to using OpenDNS.
  3. Go to your Apple TV network settings and manually set up your network instead of doing automatic set up. I think you may have to give the Apple TV a static IP address. You certainly get to tell the Apple TV what DNS server to use during manual setup. That is where you will now enter the DNS server you found in step 1.

Your Apple TV will now use its own DNS server and ignore the one specified on your router.

Praise the Apple engineer who decided it was good to let you do this. I can find no apparent way to manually set the DNS server on my Roku box, so it usually sucks at streaming shows. My Apple TV? Not a single problem since I did this. And the rest of my network still goes through OpenDNS.

I hope this simple (and obvious) solution helps others who run into this problem.

Hats Off To Molly For Admitting This

Molly Wood
Molly Wood has always been one of the most negative tech journalists out there when it comes to Apple products. Now she seems to have done a complete turnaround, as explained in Why Apple Is Winning. She nails it here:

Apple’s killer strength, as everyone knows, is its laser-like focus on “insanely great” products, coupled with its ability to build an iron-clad ecosystem that just keeps selling more Apple products. And in a time when tech is simultaneously getting more pervasive and more complicated, Apple’s focus on simplicity and usability has never been more relevant. “It just works” is all I, at least, have time for when it comes to my tech.

And this (emphasis mine) is exactly what I have been saying is the real key to why it makes sense for your average Joe to go with Apple:

But even worse than fragmentation is the fact that Android is still more complicated, in the same way that Windows is, to operate and troubleshoot. If something goes wrong with your iPhone, you take it to the Apple store, or, at least, forum posters are all talking about the exact same hardware, OS version, and most likely, problem.

TV Makes Me Feel Inadequate

When I write code to do a search it looks something like this:

Very Dull

When computer guys on TV do a search it looks something like this:

Huge Screen!