Last night I was streaming some tunes to my sweet sound system via my Apple TV when the music started to sputter. When I tried stopping the music, the Apple TV wouldn’t respond; I tried retreating to the Apple TV’s main menu, but, like a technological nightmare, all I got was more stuttering music. I figured there must be a way to restart the darned thing without actually getting out of my chair (that’s why Thor invented remote controls, after all) and the procedure turns out to be quite simple.
This Apple Knowledge Base article spells it out for you: hold the Menu and scroll down buttons on your Apple remote for 3 or 5 seconds. That’ll cause the Apple TV to reboot into a recovery screen. From that screen you can either:
Given the conniptions the Apple TV was having, I figured running the diagnostics wouldn’t hurt. The spinning cursor of perpetual waiting was displayed for a few minutes while the diagnostics were run—it would have been nice for the Apple TV to display a little information about what, exactly, it was doing during this time—and after a few minutes the screen displayed a message letting me know that my Apple TV was working correctly (I took a picture of the message, and have included it in this post). Sure enough, my smooth jazz was no longer sputtering.
What it did, who knows. But it would seem Clarke’s Third Law is in effect.
I had to learn that near little trick when mine was updated to "take 2." couch potato, I am.
Apple KnowledgeBase article? The reset procedure is in the manual that came in the box!