Comcast Still Sucks Ass

As long as I'm living in Mount Dora, we're subscribing to Comcast cable instead of BrightHouse/Road Runner (which I never had problems with), because it's the only cable company available in our area. You may remember (but probably won't) my angry tirade a couple years ago over Comcast's acquisition and subsequent total destruction of my favorite television network, TechTV. Well, with the many quality podcasts that have since been published regularly by former TechTV personalities (most notably This Week in Tech and Diggnation), those wounds have slowly healed, though a subtly-toned scar has remaned.

However, since moving to Lake County and using Comcast's cable TV and internet service, I've seen a whole new side of Comcast's utter craptasticness that I hadn't been privy to before. For your edification (but mostly to quench my urge to rant), I thought I might enlighten you all as well.

It started when I first tried to get my internet connection setup. Comcast has this asinine system where, before you can actually use your internet connection which you've paid for, you need to install some software on your computer and fill in your information to verify and activate your account. Before you do that, any web address you type in will reroute to the Comcast page where you can download said software. First of all, how annoying is that? I don't want your stupid software taking up precious space on my hard drive. I'm paying you for internet access, that doesn't mean you own my computer, what the hell gives you the right to force me to install your crap on my machine before I can use the service I paid you for? But whatever, that's a negligible complaint. Moving on....

The first person to try to use the connection was my dad, who tried to connect with his work laptop. He would plug it in, get to the Comcast download page, and then for whatever reason, the "Download" button did not work. He would click it, and it would simply refresh the page. Over and over again. Being the fairly sophisticated geek I am, I took a look at it when I got home and I couldn't figure it the hell out either. It was bizarre. So due to Comcast's asinine requirement of installing software onto your computer before you can use their internet service, and due to their crappy web design and inability to make a freaking download link work on all computer systems, my dad was unable to use the internet at all until I got home months later and installed the crappy software on MY machine. Awesome.

So I got home and I connected my PC. I downloaded the stupid software. I entered in our account information and clicked the submit button, waited, and... adl;fkhnaeklrhnikanhkdfnh. Now it's giving me a fucking error message and won't let me finish the activation process. Son of a fucking.... Okay, no problem. I call customer support, tell them the issue I'm having, and they "fix" it from their end and tell me to restart my modem and my computer. I do, and no more Comcast download page. Everything works fine. I say thank you and hang up, and a few hours later I'm getting the stupid download page again, with the same error when I try to fill in the required information. I call Comcast again and they fix it again, and this time, for whatever reason, it sticks and I don't get the download page anymore. Okay. At least that's over with. Now we move on to the issues with their television service.

To summarize in a few words: Their DVR is a total piece of flaming shit. And I don't just mean, "It's the free cable company DVR" piece of shit, I mean to say that I might have an easier time trying to get a TV signal out of an actual lump of canine feces, lit aflame, setting on my entertainment center. It started with fairly simply complaints. The navigation is a pain in the ass and I still have no idea how to get to most of the options and settings. There's actually a certain set of options that can only be accessed by pressing the menu button while the box is turned off. Guess how long it took me to figure that one out? It's also missing a lot of the nifty features that I liked a lot with BrightHouse's DVR, like the thing where when you fast-forward and then hit play, it automatically jumps back a few seconds, anticipating that you probably went a little bit farther than you intended to go.

And then there's the more screwy issues I've had with it, like the way it sometimes fails to record certain programs, or sometimes the data will be corrupted in recorded programs so that halfway through watching, the video sputters and blurps random artifacts and the audio goes out of sync, and it continues to do that every few seconds throughout the rest of the recording. One time I had a recording that was corrupted so badly that it crashed the DVR when I tried to watch it. I would hit play, the screen would go blank for a while, and then the cable box would make funny clicking noises and the display would turn to all '8's. Who the hell wrote the software for this thing, Microsoft? No, it couldn't be; from what I've heard, Windows Media Center is actually pretty decent.

But nothing beats the crap I've been putting up with lately. Every show that's been recorded on an analog cable channel the past few weeks has looked like the screen shot above. (And trust me, it doesn't look any better in person. If anything, my camera phone gave it sort of the "squinting effect" and made it look a little better than it actually is.) Not the channels themselves—when I tune into them "live" they look fine—but only when I actually try to record from them. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have still been sort of watchable, merely because most of the enjoyment comes from the dialogue anyway, so you're not missing much with blurred visuals, but basically everything else I usually like to watch—Mythbusters, South Park, Iron Chef America, Law and Order: SVU (hey, it's a guilty pleasure)—have been totally destroyed. I also recorded "Koppel on Discovery: Iran" a while ago and was indescribably pissed off when it came out the same way, because I didn't know when or if it would be rerun and I was really looking forward to watching it. (I ended up finding an XviD encode on a BitTorrent tracker, though, so all is well with that. Thanks for compelling me to internet piracy, Comcast!) Since I haven't watched TV shows at their scheduled time in I-don't-know-how-many years, it's made my TV basically useless except for the four hours a week I'm watching The Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

I became so frustrated with it tonight that I decided to take a picture of the screen with my camera phone, and then decided to post about it in case some poor fellow who's considering switching to Comcast for whatever reason happens to stumble across it during his research or general Blogger browsing. And simply because I need to rant. It's been a while since I've posted a decent rant.

Anyway, the moral of the story: Avoid Comcast at all costs. Their service is not worth the cost of subscription, and the TV service is so shitty it's probably not even worth suffering through it for the 7 megabit internet connection that you probably wouldn't be able to get with DSL. Most casual users don't need a connection that fast, anyway. Choose DirectTV or Dish Network, or BrightHouse if you have the luxury of choosing between two different cable companies. Comcast is simply not worth your time, your money, or the hair you will yank out of your own head in frustration.