Home Sharing of Home Movies from another Mac

[donawalt]

I am starting to put my movies in Home Movies on Apple TV app on my Mac now.

I have 2 Apple TVs, an iPad, iPhone, and 2 Macs. I would like 1 Mac to have Home Sharing, and it has all the Home Movies.

Setting this up seemed to work fine - I see everything on all other devices except the other Mac. Both are Sonoma, Both are logged into same Apple ID, on the same network (one is Ethernet and WiFi, one is WiFi if that matters).

I tried at one point turning on Home Sharing on the backup Mac, but then devices just see a second library/set of Home Movies from that Mac. So I turned Home Sharing off on that Mac.

Why won't the second Mac sync and get the Home Movies on the primary Mac?

Thanks!

 

[Bigwaff]

Why won't the second Mac sync and get the Home Movies on the primary Mac?

Have you shutdown and rebooted the second Mac?

 

[donawalt]

Yes I have @Bigwaff, no difference. I also imported a new test mp4 video into the primary Mac, and it showed up on the ATVs, iPad, iPhone, but still nothing new on the backup Mac. Are they meant to share another Mac's Home Videos? Everything I read said with Home Sharing, on the same network and Apple ID, every device gets the Home videos.

 

[donawalt]

I am wondering now if this is some sort of network-sharing problem from the backup Mac to the primary Mac. I have sharing turned on, I even added an extra folder to share, Documents, under my account, on both Macs for testing.

So on the primary Mac I open Finder/Network, see the backup Mac's name, double click, the first time it asked for user/password, and I was looking at its documents folder.

But on the backup Mac, I bring up Finder/Network, see the primary Mac's name in the list, I double click, it hangs on Connect for a long time, and then just says "Connection failed". I tried "Connect As..." and it failed. It shows this: (Bartholomew is the primary Mac):

Is there possibly some security setting that's blocking access to the primary Mac from the backup Mac? BTW the backup Mac, can access my wife's Windows PC via Finder/Network!

 

[donawalt]

Network sharing problem fixed, but still no evidence of Home Sharing from my primary Mac on the backup Mac. All is good seeing Home Sharing/Home movies on iPad, iPhone, 2 Apple TVs. Also adding a Home Sharing from the backup Mac is seen by all the same devices, so that much works.

I am thinking now Macs just don't share each other's Home Share/Home Movies like other devices do, they are meant as "servers"? I have found no writeup on this.