AT&T U-verse → In case you were wondering the exact HD bitrate

Here you go

I suppose this is for 1 channel for 1 receiver. 5mil bits is like 5Mbps. That's half of netflix's 1080p bitrate. No wonder "cable tv" has substandard PQ. If they could increase "cable tv's" bitrates to 10mbps MPEG-4 it will look much better for larger tvs.

Thanks for posting. People on the AT&T site always tried to say U-Verse's bitrates were comparable to Directv and cable. I don't think so.

I wish I would have gotten the info on this menu sooner. The last few months I've noticed our PQ has gotten quite a bit better. I don't notice the artifacting as much anymore. I used to notice it all the time.

There have been many threads on here about the U-verse HD bitrate versus picture quality versus codec choice etc. With the h.264 codec that AT&T uses, they would need to get to a bitrate at or just above 11Mbps to equal the picture quality of an ATSC over the air MPEG-2 broadcast that runs ~19.2Mbps. At the current bitrate of 5.772997 Mbps (which is variable) they are slightly higher than half of the necessary bitrate. We will be lucky to see anything close to that, until Gigapower or pair-bonded 17a profiles begin reaching a larger majority of the customer footprint. I would guess they are working on a control channel mechanism to select between the current medium quality HD streams versus a higher quality/higher bitrate HD stream. The question is what that selected bitrate will be. I would hope that it is at least equivalent to DirecTV or 10Mbps.

People have been saying that AT&T will improve their HD PQ for years. At least since I was installed with Uverse back in Oct 2008 when I started reading the forums. It has improved just a tiny bit over the years. I finally had enough of the broken promises and dumped Uverse TV almost 2 years ago. My brother still has it. When I go over to his house it is painful to watch Uverse HD still. The Super bowl was horrible. I still have Uverse internet because I do not have a choice where I live. Internet has been very reliable. But why suffer through bad HD PQ especially at the prices AT&T charge? DirecTV and Dish both have much better PQ than Uverse HD.

The picture quality "improved". But it started out at such a low quality that they didn't have to do too much to improve it. They just have not improved it enough to even remotely cover the wide gap between their idea of HD quality and an MPEG-2 1080i broadcast over the air.

The problem was that they couldn't do it because customers didn't have the bandwidth to give on their profiles. Now the necessary bandwidth is starting to slowly come into play. It is just a matter of when they are ready to deliver the higher quality codec for all the HD channels out of each VHub and when they are ready to promote the set top firmware solution out of the lab so that customers that have the necessary bandwidth profile can auto-detect and select the higher quality HD stream. Maybe later this year or first half of next? Who knows what if any target dates they have defined for availability. One thing is for sure, they're going to have a ton of customers clamoring for upgraded DVRs when they do finally decide to roll it out.

What you saying about having two different HD bitrates for a rollout of a higher quality stream makes sense.

Have you heard rumors about this being working on or just a hope for something that they are doing?

How do you access the diag page on the DVR?

If you mean the ATT Uverse Forum, you're wrong.

This same user was over posting his picture after he tried to prove the max was about 3.5 M so it could fit on 150 hours HD on a 500G hard drive unit.

Another user posted it about 6Mbps which was pretty right at 5772 Kbps the yahoo posted his picture when I posted I saw 5668 Kbps on USA HD on Uverse Realtime.

Chris

I have heard rumors for the past 2 years from a variety of people that would know or have access to that kind of info. The key is that they had to have the ability to deliver a bandwidth profile to customers that could support 4-6 streams at whatever the selected bitrate ends up being. Assuming the target is around 10Mbps for an HD stream that would mean they would need at least 30-50Mbps of additional bandwidth in the customer profile above the Internet bandwidth to be able to support it. With the rollout of 17a profiles and the O series cards that are capable of 100Meg pair-bonding and virtual pair-bonding, the necessary bandwidth is starting to become a reality.

Don't hold your breath, though. I doubt we will see any announcement about it until there is more of an established base of availability for the upgraded cards and services. Who knows what the threshold is and when they may get there. If we're lucky maybe late this year to early next year we'll see an announcement.

It seems to be about a 2 year cycle from the introduction of new features/services based on upgraded hardware, until the existing market footprint sees a majority of coverage. So, based on the current delivery pace of 17a profiles, it will probably be at least another year after the announcement, until the market sees wider coverage, as more O cards are deployed and Gigapower xGPON installs happen. 17a profiles were just recently announced/released for general deployment in the last couple months. So if they announce an HD upgrade late this year, that gives them about a year head start to deliver the infrastructure capability. So by the time they actually launch the higher bitrate HD streams for general access, they will have at least 14-15 months of VRAD upgrades and installs behind them to support it. The following year will be icing on the cake as that gets them closer to 80% coverage. As time goes on many of the existing VRADs will get bumped up to support x-GPON Gigapower, too. So, between deployment of O series cards and x-GPON/FTTP deployments, I would think the coverage would be nearing 80% by the end of 2016.

Of course, that could all be just highly wishful thinking. But it is a fair guess given the current timing of rollouts and all of the recent announcements that have happened. I could be guessing a good year ahead of schedule. But, I hope my optimistic view is more accurate.

I have a friend that is working very closely with a local ISP that is in the build out phase of a 100% FTTP solution. They are also using MediaRoom as their IPTV platform. I've gotten to see a lot of the behind the scenes stuff on how things are setup, and some of the limitations of the service.

All the channels are hard set to their bitrate. They don't change unless someone changes it. The only difference i've seen looking at different channels is that the locals are slightly lower. Around 5.2 instead of the 5.7 like all the rest.

Well sounds like those with Gigapower would likely be the first users to get this upgraded HD multicast stream. Gigapower would have a ton more headroom like Google Fiber to easily offer higher quality HD video streams.

I agree that it is very likely a year away before we start seeing this.

It makes me excited to see that there are at least some possibility of getting upgraded HD. I am buying a house that will get FTTP Uverse and so it will be great to have a home with FTTP as an option.

From what I understand they are looking at options for a second Guide template that maps the HD channels to an alternate higher quality HD stream. How they provision to the end users and automatically determine who is eligible for the "upgraded" Guide, I have no clue. The point is that they can't just go upgrade a particular channels stream codec/bitrate globally. They can only do it for customers that have the headroom on their line.

DirecTV crams up to 6 (sometimes 5) channels into 1 transponder, which has 38 Mbps bandwidth. The bandwidth is variable though, the ground unit that encodes the 38 Mbps stream to send it up to the satellite might award 8 Mbps to the high-profile sports stream, and only 4 to the cartoon show. And it changes constantly during the shows.

DirecTV also very carefully spreads the "high profile" channels among the transponders, you will rarely see 2 sports channels on 1 transponder, and if you do that transponder will usually only have 5 channels total. You will usually see 1 or 2 channels that have really good shows and are popular with 3 or 4 channels that aren't as popular, and spread out the bitrates. That said, even with 6 channels on full steam on 38 Mbps, each channel would still get a MINIMUM of around 6.2 Mbps.

On average, a DirecTV channel has around 6.5-7 Mbps on MPEG4, which seems to be around 20% more bandwidth then U-Verse.

Cable television is between 12 and 16 Mbps (depending on channel), but it is MPEG2 which requires more bitrate for the same quality. So you can't really compare bitrate to bitrate.

Over-the-air broadcasts are 19.38 Mbps per channel. However, many stations have "sub stations" in SD broadcasted within the same channel (e.g. channel 4.1 is NBC, channel 4.2 is COZI in SD, probably taking around 1.5 Mbps (hey it's SD) and thus leaving around 18 Mbps for the OTA HD broadcast).

Compare: Bluray HD is 40 Mbps, but is 1080p. (1080i like television would be 20 Mbps if comparing to BluRay, not really comparable though).

This all said, I believe U-verse is at the BOTTOM of the totempole when it comes to picture quality.

maartena has summed it up quite well.This is arguable in a few cases with some of the cable providers using MPEG2. The point is, all the providers are robbing Peter to pay Paul in one way or another in the stream bitrate vs. codec. vs. picture quality challenge. I'm not sure why the cable providers wouldn't switch to h.264 codecs and blow away the picture quality of U-verse and all the Dish providers? They could come out with rock star picture quality pretty easily looking better across the board than DirecTV and challenging FiOS. They are probably hemmed in by the capabilities of their set tops, unfortunately.

Most 1080p BluRays are 24fps film. 1080i/60 needs more bandwidth than 1080p/24.

That's why so much VOD is in 1080p format, it sounds great from a marketing standpoint (1080p bluray quality!) but it's really a more efficient way to transmit a film (no duplicate frames trying to get to 60fps).Definitely. Some of TWC's MPEG-2 HD channels looked like absolute sh*t for a while after they took over from Comcast. At least U-verse PQ is typically not great but acceptable. As for why cable cos haven't switched to H.264, that would mean they'd have to replace people's set top boxes, and you typical cable company is just too cheap for that. Around here I still hear about people getting DCT6416s when setting up new service.

How was this accessed? I want to check it out on my receiver.

Go to system information on your receiver and then type avdiags on your remote.

So what h.264 profile/level is AT&T using for their HD streams? Is it 3.1 @720i with additional compression? 720p appears starts at 14Mbps @ 30fps. So, 720i might drop that to about 8 or 9 Mbps. Hence, why AT&T's picture quality looks so bad at times. They are having to implement additional compression to drop the bitrate below 6Mbps but still achieve 720i at 15fps. Pathetic.

To think I watched the Rolling Stones acoustic concert back in 2004 in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround with an MPEG2 1080i picture over the air and here we are almost exactly 11 years later and the providers can't even barely get their nose above the bar for 720i with an even more efficient codec. It's disgusting. No wonder everyone is dropping the TV providers for a combo of a la carte services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc. The TV providers felt safe with their omnipotent market control and they failed to see the market disruption looming over the Internet coinciding with their less than competitive approach to deliver higher quality video streams. It is almost as bad as Blockbuster's too little too late reaction to Netflix. I think the incumbent TV provider's deep pockets will luckily save their butts in the bandwidth arms race this time. I don't think they'll go extinct just yet. Which reminds me, I really need to go mount my antenna in the attic.

And all of these "improvements" talked about here for AT&T improving their HD PQ is just speculation. AT&T has a track record of always playing catch up. If and when all of these improvements happen (1,2, or 3 years down the line) AT&T will still be behind. They will have to play catch up again with 4K hitting main stream. Why stay with someone who might improve things in a few years when I can get a much better picture now? That's why I dumped Uverse TV. I paid a lot of money for a sub par HD picture.

Ive had U-verse and went to a neighbors house right after he got it installed yesterday and he got the "high capacity" DVR (500GB was standard in direct HR's like 3 years ago). Anyways his says 145 hours of HD available with nothing recorded. So you do the math, anyway you debate it or analyze it u-verse's pq is the worst of any provider.

I find it strange that I had to type in the same thing to get it to clear the diagnostics. Even turning the box off and back on left this mode enabled.

So far I haven't seen anyone with Gigapower actually validate that they are getting the same assumed 5.5-6 mbit multicast stream. benk016 I believe still can't get 45 mbit plan yet. I have seen many posts from him wishing he could get 45 mbits on FTTP.

Has anyone with 45 mbit or Gigapower plans tried checking the bitrate on their DVR to see if they happen to be getting a higher bitrate and just didn't know it.

Per others above you should be go to system information on your receiver and then type avdiags on your remote to check the bitrate.

Yes I checked and it is the same bitrate 5.7. I have the FTTP with 45 mbps speed. This is the max that I can get.

Allocated manged memory this what to look for. 8.3 Mbps on that channel. 5.7-9.8Mbps is what the channels run at now. Most HDs are around 8 Mbps with some (like ESPN) usually floating around the higher end.

Whaaaat?? How does 8,337KB of allocated managed memory equate to a bitrate of 8.3Mbps?! Clue me in on the math relationship. Last I checked 8.3Mbps equals 1.0375 Megabytes per second of data. Is there some relationship between amount of data transferred per second and the amount of video buffering that occurs?

I am assuming that even though the screenshot says 8337 KiloBytes (KB) it probably really meant 8337 Kilobits (Kb).

If that is true ESPN2 is running at 8.14 Mbits

To convert to megabits you have to divide by 1024 NOT 1000

8337 / 1024 = 8.14 Mbits

Also from the 1st screenshot at the beginning showing 5772997 bits. That is not 5.7 mbits like people were assuming.

To convert to megabits you need to divide by 1024 twice
((5772997 / 1024) / 1024) = 5.51 Mbits

People, the information shown on that last screenshot is simply the amount of RAM that is available and in use on the gateway in question, it has nothing to do with the bitrate of the channel he is watching. He is looking at the TAB which displays that kind of information.

Also: ESPN is 720p, it could have a lower bitrate then 5.6 Mbps and still look decent.

I was finally able to get it about 4 months ago. This bitrate is on the 45mb plan.