Shortly before I received my notice from Comcast regarding their data capping scheme, I began experiencing intermittent issues accessing Netflix via my Apple TV and my iDevices… I naturally assumed it was Comcast doing something to filter and otherwise mess with a prime competitor to their own web services.
But after digging into it further I found that I could access Netflix just fine from my Mac computer. I could also access HULU from my Apple TV but Netflix was still a bust and so was trying to access anything through the Trailers app.
Resetting the Apple TV via a restart or unplugging it resulted in it taking an incredible amount of time for it to bring up the apps. You basically stare at the default “Computers” and “System” apps and nothing else for … I’m not sure how long – but definitely over a half hour where it should take mere moments for them to populate.
Other pieces of the constellation of symptoms soon started manifesting (or at least being recognized), I was having occasional glitches when using my web browser (Safari mostly these days) where a URL would populate in the address field and the progress bar would advance about a quarter of the way across the field and pause. Often just clicking on the field and hitting enter would get it to reload properly.
It turns out that there must be something going awry with OpenDNS. I went to my router and removed the OpenDNS IPs and restarted the router and allowed my provider to populate them and *poof* it appears all my symptoms have disappeared.
Of course the proof will be if the issues stay gone as to whether this is a permanent solution or just something that’s masking another issue that I have yet to stumble upon. But I wanted to post this in case there are any other folks with resolution issues who use OpenDNS.
This doesn’t guarantee that Comcast isn’t somehow messing with OpenDNS, but that’s probably a stretch. As much as I distrust Comcast I’m not sure how much benefit they would have in controlling their customer’s DNS resolution capabilities. And I’m still ticked that they are doing the metering thing so … anything is possible.