AT&T U-verse HDTV - Page 93

Sometimes it can come down to numbers. If indeed the bitrate of a U-Verse HD feed is only 60% of the other guys, something has to leave to cut out all that data --- and its picture quality.

I agree a test would be ideal, and even I am holding judgement until I actually SEE it for myself, but so far, the numbers behind the remarks don't lie.

As I stated earlier I ran Directv, ATT and OTA at the same time for a couple of months. Basically ATT paid for this little experiment with their sign up bonus. While there is no doubt that in most cases OTA wins Uverse was not that bad. I ended up keeping my directv setup, mainly because I was more comfortable with it, and it allowed me to record more HD. Uverse was a tad softer and had a few more glitches, rare but there, than Directv.

I would have no problem recommending ATT to any of my family or friends, none of whom are as picky about quality and HD content as I am. It's not perfect, but no provider is.

I made a new post over in the hardware section, so as not to dilute this forum, could you please reply over there?

About a week ago, all of a sudden all my recordings off of my local HD TV channels (for shows like 24, Lost, etc) have begun to sound like the old blown out car window speaker boxes from an outdoor theater! Scratchy and muffled, like having the volume pushed past the speaker limits. This only happens when digital surround is selected. If I set the sound to stereo, it clears up. But we are NOT paying for stereo sound on HD channels!!!

Example: 1004, FOX. I have not yet had a chance to check on the plain channel 4, as I work long hours and prefer to record off the 1XXX HD local channels because the normal, lower channels (as in 4, FOX) don't always seem to be in true HD mode.

My friend had Comcast for years, and made the switch over to U-Verse, and had the opportunity to compare both side by side. We both agreed, that on both a Panny 720p plasma and his Panny 1080p plasma, that Comcast had a much better picture. Didn't have a chance to compare OTA. It was a noticeable difference. And, as I've had DirecTV for 8 years, with HD service since they launched it, I could pretty easily tell the PQ was not as good. I have no prior experience with AT&T, nor am I disgruntled.

The problem with U-Verse is, one person's experience with PQ may be much different than someone else's, due to distance from VRAD, etc. I don't think cable users have that variance.

Whatever, in the end, if the end user is happy with the product, that's really all that matters.

I have both Directv and U-Verse right now. I am a custom installer and have calibrated the HDMI inputs for both feeds. U-Verse is inferior to Directv according to my eyes. It's good, just not the best out there.

They don't. How many HD channels one can watch being controlled by a distance from a node is the silliest thing I ever heard.

DSL being distance sensitive is not a new thing, just like cable using shared node topology isn't new.

But we are talking about TV. Cable and satellite can deliver more than 3 HD channels. Or 3 times 3. Or more.

Customer: How many TV sets can I have?

Salesperson: wait, let me get out the tape measure....

LOL

Wait; isn't that exactly the case with U-Verse?

Yes, and it is the biggest problem with U-Verse. Inferior PQ is bad enough, but limiting how many HD channels I can watch (or record) at one time is a showstopper. It's not silly so much as it is a bad call by AT&T in deciding not to deliver fiber to the home. They had their reasons and the market will decide if they were right over the long term.

If their service was cheaper than everyone else's I could understand, but it's not.

i know ive bashed uverse on here, despite being a customer, so i should clarify. the only time i see the HD degradation is when watching sports. watching Law and Order, or LOST, or something along those lines looks fine. it's the fast moving stuff that breaks down.

I am sure it is dependent on your home situation but the stream limit really has never been an issue in my house and now I have 3HD streams. This is probably because we DVR everything so while we may be recording two HD shows we are watching two HD recordings and watching a SD show on our 3 TVs most of the time.

With 3HD I'm not sure that is an issue for most people. It's not like you can record more than 2 HD shows per DVR through your cable provider. My SA 8300 DVR from Time Warner allowed the recording of 2 HD shows at the same time while being able to watch another show in HD concurrently. That is what U-verse does now with the exception that the 3rd HD show would have to be watched on another TV than the one attached to the DVR. The whole home DVR feature more than offsets that for me because I can watch anything I recorded anywhere in my house vs. just on the DVR that was used to record the show.

I am not aware of many situations where U-verse is not cheaper than cable. That is one of the biggest selling points and pretty much accepted as fact in the marketplace.

Yes, per DVR.. I can put 16 cable DVRs in my house and record 32 HD channels at once. Not that I want that may boxes, but it illustrates the limit of Uverse.

If you're lucky enough that those 32 HD channels are actually being sent to your house, because other folks in the neighborhood are watching other channels and the node is full.

Cable does not send you EVERY channel, they send the neighborhood a limited number of streams, and send you the ones you ask for, up to a neighborhood limit.

The problem is that most everything is on HD now, and if you have an average size household where everyone wants to watch (and record) their own stuff, you're going to hit the limit all the time. I routinely record 3-4 HD shows at a time because of conflicts, and it's very easy to do with a couple of Tivos or (in my case) a Tivo and a Myth box.

I think dolmar pretty much disputed what you were saying about U-Verse being cheaper previously in this thread, but anyway I said 'everyone else' not just cable. With their stream and PQ limitations, they really need to be cheaper than all other providers.

This is absolutely not true for non switched digital systems like mine (Comcast in the ATL). You can watch whatever you want on any TV or DVR you have, and it has nothing to do with how many other folks are watching. All HD channels are available to every house.

i still get a kick out of how seriously/personally people take their TV provider

I think you are thinking of SDV ( Switched Video ), that is where they send you the channel that you ask for. As for the other channels they are ALL in the loop and they are ALL available all the time. In the San Francisco Bay Area we are not using SDV but it is coming soon.

A full node ?? You can't do that with cable tv programing. You can run out of bandwidth to add more channels to the whole system which is a concern with any provider and they all have problems with not having enough bandwidth but you can't run out of bandwidth by just tuning in more channels. It is not dependent on the nodes in each area .

You are probably thinking of the node limits of cables internet connections, which is shared bandwidth in the individual nodes, this has nothing to do with the tv programing in their system.

Just so we're clear on what I'm saying, ALL the channels are available ALL the time and the nodes don't limit the channels that are available at any given time. The exception is SDV channels which are only available when the customer asks for a specific SDV channel to be sent to them. This is how cable does it, it is not how AT&T does their service. They use a sort of channel on demand system, like SDV, and that might be where you are confusing things.

Laters,
Mikef5

Good news if you can't live with the stream limit you can use cable or satellite. Each system has its own specs if they don't meet your needs find one that does.

One thing to keep in mind when evaluating the quality of U-verse as opposed to satellite, coaxial cable, or FIOS. The latter 3 were all designed for multichannel television, so they do it really well. U-verse comes into the home on a facility that was (in many cases) installed decades ago and was designed to pass a single 3 khz voice channel. Actually 2.7 khz, to be precise.

The fact that we're now getting 2 to 3 channels of HD TV, in quality that approaches or sometimes equals the others, on a lengthy run of something intended for 2.7 khz is rather amazing. I have a real hard time accepting that all of it, including my phone and Internet, comes through the wall on a single pair of #24 wires. But it does.

If you want to put 16 cable DVR's in your house, it is going to cost you about $400 in DVR rental fees alone if the cable company would even do it. I'm not sure that illustrates the limit of anything.


When vDSL2 pair bonding comes out in 4Q10 or 1Q11, there will be the potential for up to 8 HD streams. Cable had about a 30 year head start on phone company in providing TV, I think if they catch up to them feature wise within 4 years of initial launch that isn't too shabby.


The limitations are well documented, as is the fact that U-verse is almost always cheaper. Cable, FiOS and U-verse all have their pros and cons.

Yes, it is a good thing. But it would have been much better if AT&T hadn't cheaped out and instead ran fiber to every home, just like FIOS.

It is not really about being cheap, AT&T did the cost benefit analysis and felt they could get a bigger footprint and be more profitable using their existing infrastructure. They too are doing FTTP in new developments. I think everyone realizes that having FTTP is best, the fact that FIOS uses QAM instead of IPTV though seems to me to be a mistake on their part technology wise. In the end we will see if there is a winner. At this point in time Verizon seems to winding down FIOS, this article says that it costs them $1350 per customer to get a FIOS home running

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100326/...c_verizon_fios

Yes, SDV, which is being used more and more to get all the HD channels. Most of the HD channels here in TWC RDU are on SDV, and I was regularly getting "channel unavailable, try again later" messages. That usually requires them to reconfigure things to get around, or add more capacity to the node, but they do not have the bandwidth to send all HD channels to all subscribers in a neighborhood.

Hi,

I have read the forums and deduced that PQ wise the list goes in this order:
1. Verizon FiOS
2. Directv
3. Dish (close 3rd/2,3 is a tie).
4. Comcast
5. Uverse

I have FTTH and am wondering if there is a PQ difference between FTTH (home) vs FTTN (node).

Can anyone comment? And is my deduction for PQ correct?

I would put Comcast equal to, and perhaps slightly better than, D* and definitely better than E*.

But it varies on a channel-to-channel basis because of the QAM compression used by Comcast. HD locals are as good as OTA but some networks (Syfy, USA, etc.) can look grainy because they're on 3:1 QAM channels.

FTTH will always be better than FTTN if done right - FIOS vs. U-Verse is proof of that.

I meant to say I have FTTH but its ATTs Uverse only no FiOS . So I was wondering if the PQ is better on Uverse FTTH than those who have FTTN with coax to the house. Has anyone done a comparison?

No, it's the exact same.

In theory fiber into the home is a much better solution, but the way AT&T's system is set up, all U-verse subs get the exact same HD image quality.

So I got my U-Verse installed today and am pretty pleased with the picture. For the HD shows that I typically watch on Monday's, I watched them on my DirecTV and then on U-Verse, and they pictures looked really close --- hard for me to tell a PQ difference.

Now I think with Sports, that may be another story, with all the motion, but we will see how that ends up.

One thing I DID notice, was that the U-Verse picture seemed darker a bit. Now it goes into my TV via the same HDMI input as my DirecTV and Blu-Ray player, and I did calibrate the TV for that. But the HDMI out of the U-Verse did seem a bit darker.

Are there any "advanced" tricks that can be done to tune the color of the U-Verse DVR on the HDMI port to help calibrate it? I thought I read somewhere that someone had dome some tweaking on the HDMI for U-Verse, but I can't remember where I saw that or how it was done, or what recommended settings may be.

Thanks