Home sharing and Catalina

Mac
#1

Hi its been a while since I have posted in this forum but I am desperate to work out my issues with Catalina and home sharing. I have an iMac that is a media server for my household. 3 apple TV’s, iPad’s and another MacBook Pro all access the media stored on an external drive connected to my iMac. With Mojave I had no issues of the iMac home sharing functionality. I upgrade my iMac and MacBook Pro to Catalina and my MacBook pro can only see say 25% of the library. I have searched for solutions but none of them have worked. I realise there is now media sharing setting in System Preferences. I have de authorised and signed out of account several ties and nothing has fixed this. The strangest thing is I can see some of my shared library but not all of it. This issue does not exist on any other device

#2

I don’t know what the solution to your problem is, as I’ve never personally encountered it before. But here are some general troubleshooting hints that might point you in the right direction.

  • Only your Catalina MBP has the issue seeing all of your home sharing media from your Catalina iMac? Your Apple TVs, and iPads, also on their latest iOS versions, have no issues seeing the entire library? Do you happen to have another Mac, Catalina or otherwise, that you may be able to borrow to determine if this is a Mac-specific issue, or whether it’s related to Catalina specifically? If not, depending on how committed you are to resolving the issue, you could burn a few hours on installing an older version of macOS onto an external USB or hard drive, then booting the MacBook Pro up from that and seeing if that works.

  • When you say you can only see a portion of your home sharing library, is it the same portion every time you fire up home sharing? If you add new or remove media, does that portion change by the added/removed amount? Knowing the answer to this isn’t that helpful, in terms of resolving your issue, but may allow you to point the finger at Home Sharing within Catalina, if that’s what the problem is.

#3

Thanks for the reply. I have another MacBook Pro running High Sierra that I could charge and boot up. It’s abut 10 years old but still works.

On the portion issue. I have say 300+ movies and 1000+ TV shows (close to 3TB) running off an external hard drive connected to my iMac. When I home share to my MacBook Pro I can only see say 30% of the content. And it is the same content each time. If I load 2 shows on to the external drive. I might see one. I am not sure how the TV library works under Catalina.