Just to fill you in I have an Apple TV2, with a networked Drobo FS NAS Drive. Connecting to the NAS Drive via SMB works, but…
The first time I click (everytime) it says error no such location, click back and click again, it works. Its fine for me but anyone that is not so Techy freaks out and just turn it off. I thought at first it was the drive going to sleep, but have been using the drive so know its awake. I guess its the connection from the Apple TV to the NAS drive dropping out.
I have several NAS devices (including a Drobo FS) and they all exhibit this behavior.
In fact I think the behavior is slightly different to what you describe! The first time after booting the ATV2 I do not get this error message when going to a share. However in the real world one rarely reboots the ATV so you will have previously accessed the share. I am guessing that it therefore something to do with the share connection going ‘stale’ and being timed out at one end, but the Media Player is not expecting the error. Backing off and trying again re-establishes the connection so both ends are in sync again. It is something that I am sure that FireCore could handle in software by doing a level of retry after ffailure that they do not currently do. It would certainly improve the feel of using ATV Flash - certainly for non-expert users.
Maybe in needs enough of us to raise support issues about this to maake it move up the FireeeCore priority list iin terms of getting it fixed.
It is one of those bugs that is probably not deemed as critical but it certainly ruins the user experience. I also personally think it is more important than it at first appears because of the effect on those who are not tech-savvy.
I have always had this error, have used 2 different Nas devices and now use a HP Microserver so its not NAS dependant.
This has been raised a few times before.
Like you, I know its going to happen so I click in and out almost instantly, then back in again and all is OK.
From an aesthetics point of view it doesn’t look good, when I show people aTV Flash, they always say ‘what was that’ before they are ‘wowed’ with the look and feel of it.
Its not a problem, more of a niggle with a quick work around to resolve it.
I know two other people that have aTV flash installed and they have the same problem as well.
Sounds similar to my issue, which is at least partly related to sleepy drives.
Often the USB HDD connected to my AirPort Extreme falls asleep, and more often than not the ATV gives up very quickly and shows an error. This is particularly annoying when the drive sleeps while a video is paused. Clicking play brings up the error, them you have to wait a few moments before selecting the file again and resuming.
Seems like the ATV just needs to wait longer before giving up and throwing errors.