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Updates, Incidents and Accidents

I've got the opposite of the usual "home theater wife" - I've now received an ultimatum that the TV needs to be mounted on the wall, the wires buried and the TV audio running through the AV system, ASAP. Which is great news.

On the other hand, we're still having a heck of a time getting our WOW Ultra TV system lined up properly. The first issue arose when our ADT security installer arrived - the phone jacks in the house, obviously, are not active. And without that, monitoring can't work.

I was in NYC for work when the installer arrived, but my wife handled the situation at least as capably as I would have. His solution was to run phone cable along the basement ceiling, from the ADT box to the phone jack nearest the UltraTV box in our den. Then, add a splitter of some sort, and voila - the ADT box and the phone are both connected to UltraTV's one active phone jack.

Except, now the phone doesn't work.

And I'm not sure if the ADT line is working either.

And last night, the UltraTV completely froze while we were trying to delete a program from the whole-home DVR. Literally - it wasn't a hanging menu or an eternally spinning beachball or progress bar - it was the TV equivalent of a BSOD. I had to reboot the central box AND the particular TV's box just to get the TV off of a freeze-frame image of Animal Planet's "My Cat From Hell".

But, what UltraTV taketh away, it also giveth - big email today from them about the HomeConnect feature, which allows streaming video from any DLNA server program on a networked PC. I've got a number of movies (and home movies) that I'd love to be able to access from the UltraTV menu - this was THE killer feature that got me to sign on in the first place.

If I can get it working well, I'll stick with WOW a bit longer.

If it's less than flawless, I think I'm going to be totally unbundled tout suite - DirecTV for TV, AT&T for phone, and Comcast for Internet. It's not as though it's going to cost me all that much extra, and ideally, the phone lines will actually work.




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