For the last few weeks, I've been driven potty by my apple TV refusing to play any netflix or vimeo content, and instead showing "An error occurred loading this content. Try again later."

I've been through all of the troubleshooting I could find online, from a simple "hold menu and down to reset the ATV2", through the "unplug everything from the mains, reconnect the HDMI cable, plug in TV, wait, plug in ATV2", and have even tried disabling IPv6 on my home network, changing the ATV DNS servers to OpenDNS or Google DNS, and still nothing.

It wasn't until I ssh-ed onto the ATV to copy my XBMC advancedsettings.xml (and related files) that I stumbled upon the problem. I decided to make sure that all of the packages were up to date, and when I ran apt-get update, I received some "undetermined error" messages. "Odd", I thought, "I'll start doing some basic diagnostics", so I checked the on-board storage space, and came up with this:


Apple-TV:~ root# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1s1 681M 602M 72M 90% /
devfs 26K 26K 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s1s2 6.8G 6.8G 16K 100% /private/var

A 100% used partition? That doesn't sound good. A few moments later, and I had tracked this down to the following path:


/private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/AppleTV/Video/LocalAndRental

Which had just over 5GB of files called things like "CachedMedia-VDP0iK" in it. I deleted these, rebooted the ATV2 for good luck, and lo and behold, vimeo and netflix are both working again.

So, if your ATV2 has stopped streaming various things, and you think you've tried absolutely everything to fix it, here's another thing for your list.