AT&T Uverse Total Home DVR

[js6751]

Just woke up this morning, and now have it in my house. I live in zip 53219. Does anyone else have it now?

[TPK]

Just woke up this morning, and now have it in my house. I live in zip 53219. Does anyone else have it now?

Yep, I have it here in Bayside (53217)...

Was waken up at 2:00am to the super-bright power button's LED flashing on and off on the STB connected to my bedroom TV (wow that was obnoxious...  I could see the green circular LED through my eyelids), so I turned on the TV and it said that an update was available....

I accepted the update and watched the progress bar crawl across the screen at 1 percent a minute, so I turned it off and went back to sleep..

This morning I had whole home DVR...

The splash-screen for the STB is different too...

I wonder what other upgrades they pushed out to the boxes (besides whdvr) last night as well..

[Mrtanner]

I've got it in Racine (53402)  

I was watching TV at 2:00 this morning and a message appeared giving me the option of updating my system or continuing to watch TV.  I thought it might be the THDVR so I clicked "Update".  The box rebooted and the screen displayed a progress bar indicating it would take 15 minutes.

[jeaves79]

How exactly does it work?  do you need a DVR in the bedroom to watch something that was taped on a DVR in the living room?

[Gregg Lengling]

Nope you can watch any program recorded on the DVR on any other STB in the house you can even pause it in the bedrooom and pick up where you left off in another room.

[TPK]

How exactly does it work?  do you need a DVR in the bedroom to watch something that was taped on a DVR in the living room?

All the set top boxes (STBs) are on the same network, so the non DVR STBs have the ability now to talk to the DVR STB and schedule recordings, and even view recordings from there, just as if you were watching TV with the DVR STB..  In fact, since they all look the same, its kind of hard to tell which box is the DVR box and which box is not....

I decided to run it through a little "test" just now....   I have 3 STBs in my house (1 DVR, 2 non DVR)...  I wanted to see if the 100 megabit network and the DVR STB would be able to keep up if I pushed it to the max...

So I went to the 2 non-DVR STBs and brought up 2 different HD recordings to watch (I only have the 1 HD TV hooked up to my DVR STB, but it shouldnt matter, the STB probably cannot even tell if Im hooked up to a HDTV or not)...

Then I went to the DVR STB, set up 2 HD recordings, and 2 non-HD recordings (the most I can record), and also brought up a HD recording for viewing on that TV...

Also, at the same time, I downloaded a large file over the internet from the Intel web site...

To my utter surprise and amazement, it all worked....   I checked all the TVs and they all seemed to be able to display HD recordings efficiently without any apparent dropped frames or skips, etc...

So in doing this, the hard drive on the DVR was effectively handling 7 television streams: 4 recording inbound (2 SD and 2 HD), 2 viewing outbound (2 HD) and 1 viewing internal (HD)....  Thats a lot of hard drive activity, not to mention network activity all over the same 100 MBit network...

Color me surprised, but I was quite impressed...

I wonder what would happen if I had a few more STBs, each watching another HD recording...  I wonder if there is a "hard limit", or if you can keep watching recordings on as many STBs as you like until the HD or network just cannot keep up anymore and you start dropping frames, etc (soft limit)...  Unfortunatley, I only have those 3 STBs, so I guess for now this test is the best I can do...


... Edit ....

Forget what I said about scheduling recordings on the non DVR STB, it appears that you can only schedule recordings if you are on the DVR STB (or, ironically, use the web remote over the internet)....

I think thats kinda silly (that you can schedule a recording from anywhere over the internet, but not from a STB in your house)...  Perhaps that is something they will address soon....

Also, there is no "chase" buffer on the non-DVR STBs for pausing and re-winding live TV (I guess I can understand that), and you cannot manage series recordings or even look at the scheduled recordings on the non-DVR STBs..

[bschmidt25]

Yup - I got mine last night too (Glendale).  I was also up watching TV (mine came in around 1) but didn't get any prompt to update on the DVR - it just locked up everything.  My second box rebooted right away and I saw two gear icons on the screen and a progress bar and figured out pretty quick what was going on.  Took a good 20-30 minutes, but I checked right away for WHDVR and sure enough it was there.  On screen menus look slightly different (shaded edges on the info bar, a darker shade of blue, and HUGE numbers when you type them in now) but other than that not much difference.

On a somewhat related note, has anyone checked to see if any of the HDMI issues were resolved with this update?

[jgeiger]

Is there anyway to record 3 HD shows at once on the U-verse system?

I'm on TWC right now with 2 DVR boxes, so I'm able to record 4 HD shows at once, but I was interested in the U-verse system.

The only thing holding it back is the inability to record more than 2 HD shows at once. (Think Sunday night with NFL, Simpsons, Amazing Race and Extreme Makeover Home Edition)

Thanks.

[TPK]

Is there anyway to record 3 HD shows at once on the U-verse system?

I'm on TWC right now with 2 DVR boxes, so I'm able to record 4 HD shows at once, but I was interested in the U-verse system.

The only thing holding it back is the inability to record more than 2 HD shows at once. (Think Sunday night with NFL, Simpsons, Amazing Race and Extreme Makeover Home Edition)

Thanks.

(jgeiger, check your personal messages)

As of now, U-verse can only deliver 2 HD streams per installation at any given time, so even if you could provision more than 1 DVR (as far as I know you cannot), you still would be limited to 2 HD recordings because you can only tune into 2 HD streams at a time anyhow...

However in the example you give, at least one of the shows you mention (Simpsons) is not in HD, and you CAN record 2 SD shows along with 2 HD shows at the same time (so for the Simpsons you would simply use the SD channel instead of the HD channel, and still be able to record 2 HD channels)...

2 HD limitation per household kinda sucks, but its a lot better than it was just a few months ago (before they increased from 1 HD stream to 2 HD streams)...  And now with whole home DVR, it makes having more than 1 DVR sort of redundant anyhow...

For me, personally, if I want to record network TV, I am going to start using the DVR in my microsoft media center (for broadcast TV in HD) rather than the u-verse DVR....

[MarkK]

I got THDVR sometime in the last few days.  I see the huge channel numbers as well.  I wonder if this update was related to all of my recorded series being reset to channel 0, and thus not recording.  That also happened in the last two weeks.

The other change I notice is that for my recorded programs, if there are several recorded episodes of a series, then rather than list each episode separately, the series title shows up, along with the number of recorded episodes.  Click the entry, and then all recorded episodes show up.  This is a nice improvement.