When Is HD Crap? When It's Had the Hell Compressed Out Of It

A few weeks ago, Comcast jerked my chain one too many times and I resolved to dump them. Their latest offense is forcing all customers to use a set-top box for every TV in their house. You're no longer allowed to plug your "cable-ready" TV into a wall socket. AND if you have more than two television sets, they will be charging $2 per set per month for the "privilege" of using these set-top boxes.

Crapcastic, indeed.

Incidentally, the Tuscaloosa News had the gall to run a Comcast PR release as if it were a news story--headlining it "Comcast upgrading Tuscaloosa service":

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20100608/NEWS/100609669

No customers/customer support groups were contacted. So much for balanced reporting.

AT&T had run fiber optic cable into my 'hood last year and I was curious to see if it was rilly fast. So, I signed up for it.

Let me tell you, it is smokin' fast. I am lovin' the 'net access.

However, I am not lovin' U-verse -- the TV service that came bundled with it. I paid a premium to get HD service and to have it run in two rooms -- off of one HD DVR, which is pretty sweet in itself. The one fly in the ointment?

AT&T has compressed the hell out of its HD signal. And it's quite noticeable. I first saw digital artifacts in The Deadliest Catch's action scenes. Then I began to see them even in The Daily Show, which doesn't have a whole lot of action. Were my eyes deceiving me? Could AT&T's HD really be this bad?

I started Googling around about it and found forum posts on AT&T's community forums about the poor picture quality. In one thread titled, "Why does U-Verse Suck So Bad??", I found an explanation by SomeJoe7777, midway down on this page:

Every customer does indeed get the same (crappy, overcompressed) feed. The issue is that there are many factors on the customer's end that make the compression artifacts either more or less visible than they are to other customers. The customers with large, really good TVs will notice the compression artifacts a lot more than customers with smaller, not-quite-so-good sets. Connection methods make a difference - HDMI can emphasize the artifacts, component can soften them. Bad digital processing can make the artifacts worse, good digital processing can hide them. LCD TVs can emphasize the artifacts, projection TVs can soften them. There's dozens more factors.

But as far as the compression, the fact is that AT&T is attempting to deliver 1080i feeds in 6 Mbps of H.264 bandwidth. This is about half of what's required for an artifact-free picture. It's one-quarter of what is used on a typical Blu-Ray.

Sigh.

I had hoped to winnow my online bills down from Comcast (Internet) and DirecTV (TV) to just U-verse, but now it looks like I'll need to keep DirecTV and just use U-verse for Internet.

Oh, and another crappy aspect of U-verse: It doesn't carry American Movie Classics in my market (although it does in others). That means no Mad Men this summer. Just another reason to keep tapped into DirecTV.