White Screen of death?
So here it was a Saturday night we have some friends over, and want to watch a movie. What a better chance to show off my Apple TV to some people who, I could see, buying one at some point. We all decided to watch Harold and Kumar click to rent, and after a few minutes it’s ready to watch. I press play and get…… nothing, a white screen, I can forward the chapters, but nothing no sounds no video. After a few moments of cussing, restarting, and getting the “this is why I netflix” from people around me, I pop over to the Apple support forums and found this. After a full reset (unplugging the Apple TV for 30sec) I was able to get the movie to play. In fairness this is the first time I have tried to watch while downloading; normally I download before I go to work and it runs smooth. The most frustrating part was on Sunday when I wanted to watch systm, and had to reset my Apple TV to my PC, my question is will this happen the next time also? According to what I read over at Apple support this seems to be an issue since the last firmware update, and some people have had this happen 3-4 times over the last few weeks. How about all of you, have you had this also?
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Comments
Yes, I’ve seen this before, and commented in the Apple discussions thread you linked to.
To reiterate, home computers (for various reasons) need to be restarted periodically, and AppleTV is no exception. In fact, the operating profile of an AppleTV (long periods without a restart) make it more likely that you’ll run into this type of issue…
It’s what I’ll essentially call “stale RAM”, where typically either a memory leak or a error in main memory (a so-called “alpha particle-induced” error) will cause the contents of main dynamic RAM to become corrupted. And depending upon the specifics of the error (what and where), and any subsequent error migration, will determine the likelihood of an eventual operator-visible anomaly, like the one you described.
Normally, commercial or higher-end systems (like Apple’s Mac Pro) utilize error correcting (ECC) memory that would fix most soft errors on the fly. But consumer computers like AppleTV don’t justify the added expense of ECC hardware.
In the case of the white screen, I personally think it’s more likely that an undetected memory leak exists in the Quicktime code…FWIW. But, in any case, it’s a good idea to restart your AppleTV periodically. To do this, you hold down both the minus (-) and Menu buttons together until the diagnostic mode is invoked, and follow option screens to restart.
Hope this helps. 
I’ve had a very similar experience (friends over trying to show off), but different symptoms that lead to the same actions. I was renting a movie and got to the “Connecting to the iTunes store” screen where it would just hang. Cycling power fixed it, but it took about 20 minutes for me to figure it out by which time my company was getting bored. It has happened since and I’ve let it “Connect to iTunes” for an hour without anything happening.
Also if it needs to be rebooted regularly, it’d be nice if it had a power button or a way to hard reset it from the remote. Crawling behind the entertainment center with company over is embarassing.
Can you reboot the AppleTV after it’s already started downloading a rental without messing up your download?
… or do you need to wait until the rental download is complete before rebooting?
YodaMac - You can pause and resume downloads at will, including rebooting AppleTV.
ccunning - You don’t have to crawl behind your furniture overcome with embarrassment. Just do as I describe in my final paragraph …Hold both minus and menu buttons on the remote until you invoke diagnostic mode. This will give you the option to restart. You’ll know diag mode is triggered with the status light turns blinking yellow… So, you’ll still be a bit embarrassed, but can skip the groveling part… 
Awesome tip CHASH. It seems like the kind of thing I should have known already somehow (by reading all the posts before mine?).
Thanks for the tip CHASH, I didn’t know you could reboot your appleTV with the remote, also this helped me with the white screen of death I received when trying to watch Speed Racer in HD.
So cool. I am viewing this beautifully on iphone. I got big white screen too. Tjank you so much for publishing the problem and the solution.
same thing here. Experienced it last weekend once and a reboot fixed it.