AT&T U-verse installation

Getting this put in at B's house last week went pretty smoothly, as far as the physical installation was concerned, once the installer actually showed up, the day following the day appointed. They did call on that day, Tuesday, to re-schedule, so that was not just a no-show. It was raining on Tuesday, and there was some outside work involved (not much, but some), so that amount of slippage did not seem unreasonable. We decided to keep the phone on analog service, so this was not a "whole enchilada" U-verse installation. I like the old style phones that can keep working through a power outage. The installer did a nice job routing the cables, including network cable under the carpet from the gateway to B's desktop, though I think he would have preferred to use wi-fi for that connection. I said that I would rather not be administering the router over wireless, and all that went pretty well.

So now B has Turner Classic Movies, and a better grade of DSL. According to Speedtest.net anyway. It seems to have a lot of latency, if I am using that word correctly. When I re-open Opera or Firefox with a bunch of tabs and windows from the previous session, the system hangs up for what seems like a long time. With the Verizon DSL I have at my place, the Speedtest.net score is just about the same, but I don't need to go get a cup of coffee if I am re-opening 20 tabs. On the other hand, this computer is noticeably quicker (2.0 GHz Athlon 64, 1.5 GB RAM vs. 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM), so how much of that is the connection and how much is the system might be hard to say. On the gripping hand, I don't remember that hangup happening with the slower straight DSL that B had before. Screen going all white, browser window with only the title bar showing, click in the taskbar to switch windows and nothing happens, no, that's new.

The problem that we did not notice until after the installer tech had left was that the two TV sets that had secondary cable boxes, that is to say the ones other than the DVR, were difficult to listen to because of a loud ground hum. It was just annoying on one of them, but loud enough on the other to actually drown out the audio from the channel that was playing. SO: a call to tech support. Help desk suggested various things that did not actually help, and then said that we could have another tech come over that evening (Wednesday, now; this was all supposed to have been done on Tuesday) or the next morning (Thursday). No-one showed up Wednesday evening, or on Thursday; a call to the 800 support number on Thursday afternoon got an operator who told me a story about a bad batch of set-top boxes, and that our service call had not actually been written on the schedule. Tomorrow (Friday) for sure, at noon. Calling again at 2 PM Friday, I spoke to another operator who said that somehow the noon appointment had once again not been written into the schedule. This operator was able to contact a tech who was able to show up about 3:30. At this point we finally find out that the U-verse set-top boxes have a known defect: when connected by coax, the volume drops off drastically, hence the ground noise and static overcomes the audio signal. The fix is to use the composite (yellow, white, red RCA plug) cables to connect the TV to the box. Of course, with a TV that has only a coax connector for input, this means you need a RF modulator. Fortunately, B had one handy. Unfortunately, it was already in use to connect a DVD player. Well, we seldom use that DVD player, so it could be removed from the circuit for a while until I can figure out something else. For the other TV, what worked was to run the composite cables into an old VCR, then run coax from the VCR into the TV. Essentially, this amounts to using the VCR as a RF modulator. So I need to look for a RF modulator with two sets of RCA inputs to hook up the DVD player. Which will leave the old RF modulator left over. So it goes. And see the April 6 update.

If the help desk operator would have 'fessed up to the known problem with the coax connection, I could have straightened this out on the same day. But the only advice given was to reboot the set-top box, in a couple of different ways. Which not only did not fix the problem; it wasn't even related to the problem.

By this time it was supper time on Friday. So this pretty much shot the heck out of last week. The tomatoes are doing great, though. We have Oxheart, Rutgers, and JetStar plants, all bearing pretty well. The Oxhearts are the tastiest by a lot. But they're all good. Summer tomatoes, there's nothing like them. They're worth the trouble. (Not much trouble.)

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Update, November 15: B now has "Total Home DVR." It isn't really, but that's what they are calling it. It allows you to watch recorded video on any TV set that is hooked up to a U-verse box. It will be truly Total when you can manage (start, schedule, delete) recordings, and use the rewind and pause features, from any box. [See July 20 update!] However, it's not disappointing, it's encouraging. No visit from a tech was required to make this happen. The software was upgraded from AT&T central. This gives hope for the future. These set-top boxes have USB ports that are completely useless right now, as far as I can tell. [See Jan 16 update!] But the ease of pushing software upgrades such as THDVR would appear to indicate that some thought has been given to adding features in the future, without the need to change the hardware.

We have tried scheduling recording from the Web interface, and find that it works just fine. (Though for some reason it picks up the recording about a minute early, so that you see the end of the previous program and intervening commercials. That's not just for Web-scheduled recording, it's for all scheduled recording. I'll take it—it's better than missing the opening.) We have not tried this from a cell phone, so no comment on that.

The Internetty nature of the service leads to some odd side effects; it's possible to have the same program on two sets, out-of-synch! Weird. That never happened with cable or broadcast!

Once in a while we get digital artifacts: tiling, pixelation, stop-and-restart. If this happens when recording, the artifacts are recorded. Kinda messed up last week's "The Mentalist," when Patrick switched the deck, and the picture froze right before the switch, and came back right after. Hey, whaddy do? But it's hard to tell if the problem is with U-verse or with the originating station. The digital problems persisted with the feed from WFSB for a while; switching to WCBS gave us artifact-free video. Still, that recording is messed up.

On the Internet side, I have not been seeing that "white screen when trying to open many tabs" problem in the last few weeks. And I will be looking forward to seeing what else comes down the cable in the way of software upgrades in the future. What is that USB port going to do?

There is much more information available in the forums at ATT Utalk, U-verse Users and DSL Reports.

Tomatoes are all gone by, now. My, but they were good.

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Update, December 19: I'm seeing a lot of searches on things like "connect dvd player to uverse." Sorry, you can't do that. The DVD player must be connected to the TV set, not to the U-verse set top box (STB). The U-verse STB has a good number of outputs, but the only inputs are coax and ethernet; one of these must be used to connect to the gateway router (Residential Gateway, or RG, in U-verse-speak). In our case, the audio problem on the coax mentioned above is not present with the primary STB [yes it is! see April 6 update], the one with the DVR, but only on the secondary STB's, the ones without the hard disk. So if your TV set has a coax input and composite A/V input, one thing to do would be to connect the U-verse DVR to the coax, and connect the DVD player to the A/V input (composite red, white, yellow — or red, white, and s-video or component video, if you have that). I recently bought a multi-input RF modulator, to connect a DVD player, DVD recorder/player, and VCR to a TV with both inputs: the U-verse STB, the one with the DVR, goes into the coax, everything else goes into the RF modulator, the RF modulator goes into the composite, so the TV/VCR switch on the TV remote switches between U-verse and whatever is active on the composite input. Could do it the other way around, I suppose.

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Update, Jan 16: Something for the USB port to do! There's a new remote available, with a page feature. The base for it connects to the STB by the USB port.

And a couple of days later: manual recording on the U-verse DVR suffers from the way that the DVR is tied to the guide. (Ouch! Sorry about that rhyme.) Example: a program you want to record is coming on "after football," with a nominal time of 10 pm to 11 pm. The game runs a bit long, as they always do, so you are paying attention, and hit the record button when your program actually starts, about 10:30. The DVR will record until 11:00 and then stop recording, because the guide says that that the program ended at 11:00. If you're still up and paying attention to the red light on the DVR, you can start recording again. Which will give you a recording titled "Channel X News" but which is really the second half of your program. I suppose if U-verse were to enable full manual control of the DVR, some number of halfwits or people who were just sleepy would turn it on, fall asleep, wind up with the dreaded Disk Full error. On the other hand, machines that think that they are smarter than I am, when they actually are not, are machines that are going to annoy me. I know there's a workaround for this, where you guess how much extra time you'll need … but to my mind, there ought to be a way to use that DVR the way that you could use a VCR, that is, once you start recording, it will record until the media is all done or you tell it to stop, without stopping on its own partway though the middle.

Then there was that one episode of "Fringe." I thought I had set the DVR to record it, and sure enough, there it was in the Recorded TV list, listed as "Fringe;" the info button said that it was "Fringe;" but it was an hour of the shopping channel, instead. A little glitchy, yet.

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Update, Feb 15: Another thing about manual recording and "tied to the guide." There is no facility for simple timed recording, again like a VCR. Now that Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Sources" on CNN Sunday mornings has become a segment of the four hour long "State of the Union with John King," the guide shows that whole four-hour block as one item. There is no option to record only the 10 to 11 AM segment of it. Oops! Can so do that, from Menu or Recorded TV buttons (right -arrow over to the "Add a recording" tab). In finding this, I also discovered the search feature, which will search for titles, people's names, and I don't know what else: there are thousands of entries.

B now has "Weather on Demand" on channel 227. It takes a while to start the app, but once it's started, it's reasonably quick. This is Accuweather for places of your choice, by name, map, or zip. Better than The Weather Channel because there's no waiting through documentaries about famous hurricanes to get to the local info, and since you can see any forecast you like, no waiting to get to the not so local either.

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Update April 6: I had been wondering about that ground hum on the coax, and sure enough, it was so! present on the primary STB as well as the little ones. We just had not been listening closely, and, as I mentioned above, different sets respond in different ways. So I re-arranged the inputs on that TV, so that now the STB with the DVR goes straight into the composite jacks on the TV, and the RF modulator goes into the TV's coax input. Result: the hum is gone. There is a side-effect. If you switch the TV/VCR switch on the TV when there is no signal coming from the RF modulator (no devices turned on), you can see and hear the broadcast signals of the local stations. Fuzzy, with no antenna other than the length of coax, but still there. I would have thought that would be gone by now, with the switch to digital broadcasting. It was delayed, though. We'll see how much longer the signals are visible.

Since I have been using U-verse TV, I find ordinary TV far less satisfactory. "Whaddaya mean, I can't rewind? I want to know what she said!" It's surprising even when using one of the TV's at B's that is on a STB other than the DVR to get the message, "This receiver cannot rewind live TV." So on the whole, I'm quite pleased with it. (Thought I should say that sometime, as I seem to be doing a lot of complaining here.)

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Update July 20th: A couple of weeks ago, Total Home DVR just became much closer to truly Total. It's now possible to start a recording from any set-top box, stop it, erase it, or schedule it it advance. Also: the Search feature, System Information, and probably other things I have not discovered yet, are available now from the secondary STB's. Whoopee! The main STB with the DVR in it is still the only one that can rewind live TV, but who knows how much longer that restriction will apply. Also new is a screen saver, and automatic repeat, after about 3 minutes, of a recording.