Explorer
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20 Messages
HD Compression Here To Stay?
I thought I was getting unusual amounts of HD compression. Had a technician come over who ran tests. Everything came through with flying green colors. He said the compression is designed so that at the optimal viewing distance of the TV, little to no compression artifacts can be easily made out which is partly true when I stand at the optimal distance for my 46" which is 10.5'. I sit at my desk which is immediately to the right of the TV. So I'm up close when working and glancing over at the screen. The compression artifacts are just awful up close.
I can understand trying to save on bandwidth but just barely squeezing by for the optimal viewing distance is unsatisfying. I've been up close in front of my friend's TV which has Comcast hooked up and the picture quality has a "wow" factor. I don't get that wow factor at all with my AT&T U-Verse picture quality. I've exhausted optimazing the settings on my TV, trying different cables, ports on the router, and even replacing the box only to get the same picture quality. Honestly, HD should be provided for free by AT&T. That's how sub-par the quality is to the competition.
A supervisor on the chat support said that the sales department may be able to increase the bandwidth to get better picture but I think he was giving me the run around. Sales was closed when he referred me so I'll have to wait until Monday.
After doing some research I've noticed many people have noticed the sub-par HD quality all because of the compression with discussions dating back to 2008. It looks like AT&T is doing little to nothing to try and improve the picture quality. Their cabling and hardware is more than capable of delivering clear, crisp HD picture but they choose to bottleneck the bandwidth in order to save money.
If AT&T increased their bandwidth 2x for each HD stream, AT&T would be the best TV service provider by a mile. The compression artifacts are the only con holding them back from being great. I consider AT&T U-Verse TV as tolerable. I hate going over to my friends house now because his HD picture is so clear and crisp. I was embarrased when he genuinely thought something was wrong with my TV when he noticed how bad the quality was.
AT&T fix this. It's easy and you'll be king of the crop.
DRN94
Explorer
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20 Messages
11 years ago
All AT&T needs to do is provide dedicated fiber optic lines for TV. They should engineer a cheaper more cost effective fiber optic line that is specifically designed to carry just TV programming. It would allow them to send in excellent HD picture and not eat up the bandwidth used by the internet and phone services.
Just a thought. Haven't fully educated myself on the practicalities of a fiber optic medium but Verizon FIOS and Google Fiber get great HD picture because of the use of pure fiber optic lines whereas AT&T uses a hybrid of copper and fiber optics.
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JefferMC
ACE - Expert
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35K Messages
11 years ago
Fiber provides more bandwidth with fewer issues like crosstalk. However, it's got its own maintenance and installation issues which makes it more expensive to install. The copper is already there and has the capacity to carry more signal (using more modern technologies, such as shadow circuits) than it is today.
Verizon quit rolling out FIOS several years ago. Google is requiring certain subscriber densities and commitments to justify the costs.
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DRN94
Explorer
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20 Messages
11 years ago
Google Fiber is actually a reasonable 2 year contract at $120 dollars a month. Give you gigabit internet speeds, crystal cleal HD picture, and many practical features such as cloud storage. They haven't expanded much and it's only experimental but if their business model is good they'd easily have the capacity to expand in the not so distant future. If worse comes to worse when I start living on my own, I'll just move to a place that offers fiber optics at a reasonable price.
The profit margins of these service providers are fairly large. AT&T has the capacity to overhaul a lot of their network and to increase the HD stream bitrates. I hope they think of something soon. Seems like service providers aren't interested in innovating themselves. Fiber Optics will only get more affordable to maintain as the hardware kinks are worked out.
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texasguy37
Expert
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14.5K Messages
11 years ago
Humm, what is your source for that statement? Google Fibers only recently went live for a few homes in the Kansas City area.
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DRN94
Explorer
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20 Messages
11 years ago
They're launching from scratch in the Kansas city area and plan on expanding in the near future to even parts of Missouri. Google has the money to invest. Fiber optics is the future of communication so it'll be the new standard eventually. Google wants to start it's slice of the pie now and I wouldn't be surprised if Google ends up being a huge competitor. Obviously their resources are greater than most service providers regardless of them being new on the scene. They have the advantage of having no pre-existing infrastructure.
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JefferMC
ACE - Expert
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35K Messages
11 years ago
Not only have they not expanded much, they are only expanding into neighborhoods where they get a certain level of committment to those two year contracts. This even though they've gotten sweetheart franchise deals which their competitors in the area are now complaining about not creating a level playing field.
I'd like to see the Google Customer Forums where people in neighborhoods that can't reach committment howl about it.
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beatfan4
Scholar
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153 Messages
11 years ago
Has anyone noticed a marked improvement in HD quality over the past few weeks. I had been having trouble with slow response on the DVR. Channel would change, no joke, 5 seconds after I clicked the remote and reaction time for everything was like a turtle.
I decided to power down and reboot RG and DVR and voila, i suddenly have an HD picture that almost "pops" as much as my old TWC did before I switched to U-Verse.
It is actually fun to watch the depth and detail..and no smudgy movements on sports anymore.
Hope it's here to stay!
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Linkgx1
Scholar
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112 Messages
11 years ago
New Uverse subscriber. I understand about the bit-rate too. It is still a good pq if you ask me, though I wish it was a little higher. But compared to my former Charter, the box makes up by being able to do other things.
My only request is, if possible, let us have higher bit rates if we have less boxes. For example, I have two boxes so it would be cool if I had a better bitrate than those that have 4.
But it's a first world problem, so if I want excellent PQ, I'll go to my Blu-Ray players!
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JohnTrang
Contributor
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1 Message
10 years ago
2 years after the OP, Im a new subscriber with using a Sony 55" KDL-55W950B with the wireless box ISB7005. I looked in the forum becasue I noticed halos around football players and facial tones on announcers are blurry. Moving players are pixelated. The turf is the worst. My Samsung UN46C6500 is directly connected but has similar issues. Scores and news banners look great though. With Charter, I felt like I was sitting in the stadium but was unhappy with them.
I plan on calling to get a support person out to check it out.
Any updates from OP DRN94?
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