Thread: Review: AT&T U-VERSE

Our friends at UVERSEUSERS.COM have featured our review today on their homepage.


http://www.uverseusers.com/

Thanks to UVADMIN (whoever you are)

Originally Posted by Scott Greczkowski

Our friends at UVERSEUSERS.COM have featured our review today on their homepage.


http://www.uverseusers.com/

Thanks to UVADMIN (whoever you are)

I saw that earlier. He doesn't agree with you but at least he's linking the review from the homepage.

I don't think he like that I said people should not be paying for it. And to be fair I am NOT paying for it as you get your first 2 months for free.

But one thing to take into account here in Connecticut this service is really in beta compaired to the San Antonio market which has been online for a long time.

I was told in an email today that the reason for the lack of VOD and movies was because they rushed to get CT online before the end of they year, portions of the service were not ready to go online for this area.

I got to say that I do believe this explanation.

Originally Posted by DBSOgre

I was wondering if anybody may be able to post the channel line-up for U-Verse if you have it. There website makes no mention.

All of the U-verse channel lineups can be found here:

http://uverse.att.com

Click on shop, and you will see a link to the lineups on the right side

Originally Posted by DBSOgre

I was wondering if anybody may be able to post the channel line-up for U-Verse if you have it. There website makes no mention.

Houston's U-verse channel list

Originally Posted by Scott Greczkowski

I don't think he like that I said people should not be paying for it. And to be fair I am NOT paying for it as you get your first 2 months for free.

But one thing to take into account here in Connecticut this service is really in beta compaired to the San Antonio market which has been online for a long time.

I was told in an email today that the reason for the lack of VOD and movies was because they rushed to get CT online before the end of they year, portions of the service were not ready to go online for this area.

I got to say that I do believe this explanation.

How long are you going to stay with them?

That I dont know, I may ride out my 2 months, however if improvements are made I may stick around.

I have said this before and I will say it again, I do believe that IPTV is the future of television.

Well, glad that you can get this Scott. It will never be here, at least no time in the next 10-15 years.

I don't even have DSL, my broadband, if you can call it that, is satellite (700Kbps down) at the moment, or I could get WiFi that is 256Kbps down/up. I'd be happy to get DSL, let alone U-Verse or anything close to it. I'm only about 1 mile from DSL availability, to make it even worse.

IMO, IPTV is a cool new advancement, nothing else. If you mean future as in the next 50 years, I might agree, but, any time soon, say before 2022, IPTV or movie downloads in general, will never reach 100% of general population. No broadband service in rural areas being the biggest hurdle. If you can't get at least 1.5Mbps download, downloading movies would be a daunting task. Not even counting HD movies.

DVD's, HD DVD's, etc. can get 100% coverage, all that they require is for consumers to go buy hardware, with IPTV, it requires broadband access.

this is from uverseusers.com site

Picture Quality-Bitrate-Compression

http://www.uverseusers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=394

Ok, ran a few things and still crunching it all in my head. But I've become a sort of videophile lately and have run a few things concerning HD quality.

First off U-Verse, from what I've been told, runs H.264 (AVC) for it's compression standard. I pulled a few bitrates from BD-ROM info I had culled from the net to draw a comparison.

The top overall quality encoded movies in BD-ROM using AVC are:

X-Men: The Last Stand - 27.5 Mb/s
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - 23.4 Mb/s
The Descent - 28.9 Mb/s
Eight Below - 23.3 Mb/s

These are all encoded in 1080p True HD with PCM 5.1 or DTS-HD. They are considered near flawless in terms of quality.

I finally found a decent argument for the bitrate differences. 720p uncompressed HD clocks in at roughly 1.3Gb/s while 1080p is roughly 2.98Gb/s.

Assuming a fairly even ratio across the compression you're left with roughly 44% the size.

That leaves a 720p image in high quality HD with those films listed above in a range of 10.2 to 12.7 Mb/s. If you want to go with 1080i the bitrate is half of 1080p so you're left with 11.6 to 14.4Mb/s.

Currently AT&T, I believe, encodes their video in HD to be under 10Mb/s

From what I gather if they switched to VC-1 they'd have reference level picture quality. As is they're pretty darn high still. And since VC-1 is Microsoft's codec and MS is making AT&T's IPTV software, well, here's to hope.

I can't get the service yet so I have no clue how the real world application of picture quality is but it gives me hope that it'll be as good as I hope.


Feel free to discuss and point out holes, I look forward to it.