In my continuing effort to slim down our monthly bills, I've decided to investigate switching from Dish Network to FiOS TV. I already have FiOS internet, so the savings on a package deal seem enticing, and they seem to have beefed up their channel lineup significantly since I last looked.

The one concern I have is about their DVRs. At the time I signed on with Dish Network, their multi-room DVR was superior to other offerings from DirecTV and cable providers. Looking around, it seems like Verizon has a multi-room DVR now, but they don't guarantee any specific model, so it's hard for me to tell how good they would be compared to what I have.

It looks to me like you can either use Verizon's multi-room box, or you can get a cablecard from Verizon for $4/month and use a Tivo Premiere. They both seem to have advantages and disadvantages. What I really like about my Dish DVR is the fact that it can share the two tuners and all DVR recordings with multiple rooms via a simple coax cable (or with component cables if you want to run HD to the other TVs) with no need for any converter box on the additional TVs. You're limited to two tuners (thus two concurrent DVR recordings) visible on any number of TVs, but the benefit of having just one DVR box and no other set top boxes anywhere is appealingly simple and convenient. (You do need to use RF remotes on the remote TVs, but that's not much of an issue.)

It doesn't look like anyone else offers this sort of whole-home distribution setup, or at least I haven't seen anyone else doing it. If I go the TiVo route, it looks like I need a TiVO on each TV with a cablecard to view recordings in multiple rooms, and if I go with the Verizon multi-room DVR, it looks like I need DVR boxes on the other TVs (at $10 each per month) that talk to the multi-room DVR. Has anyone else solved this problem with some sort of custom home distribution / Slingbox / Sling catcher type setup? Is there another DVR option out there I should look into? Is anyone else on FiOS and can comment on their DVR offerings?

TiVo may come out with a multi-tuner box (4 tuners?) and smaller client boxes that you'd connect to other TVs in the house to stream onto. I have no idea what the timeframe is for that, as I just saw something about it today online.

If you wanted ATSC only, then I'd have another suggestion for you. And no, not an HTPC.

Tony, I can offer some opinions on this. My mother and I both have Fios in our homes, yet I have a Tivo and she has all Verizon equipment.

There are two things about the Verizon equipment that I'll give it credit for:

1) compared to other companies' DVRs, I think they're among the best.

2) watching recorded content between devices works really well. It's actually pretty seamless, and feels like you're always watching the content from the place it was recorded.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, here's my negatives:

1) "...if I go with the Verizon multi-room DVR, it looks like I need DVR boxes on the other TVs..."

The only thing the "multi-room box" does is share recorded content with other boxes. It's not sharing tuners. So unless you have the DVR on every TV, you can't time-shift or pause live TV. My mom misses being able to do that. I'm guessing that this is why you've seen that you need DVRs on the other TVs. Otherwise any of Verizon's other boxes will be able to see the content stored on the multi-room DVR (well, the SD box can see the content there, but of course can only play the SD content).

2) The storage capacity is terrible. In fact, her DVR seems to be misreporting the storage space left to a significant degree. At one point she only had about 8 HD TV show episodes recorded, and it said she was nearly out of space. Even if it was calculating the space properly, though, she still wouldn't have much storage. *edit* I just finished a chat with a Verizon rep and to my surprise they now offer larger capacity DVRs. Apparently they come in 160, 320, and 500GB sizes. But you can't expand those like I have with my Tivo to give me 179 hours of HD and 1561 of SD.

3) I said the DVR was good for a cable company's DVR. That's not high praise in the least. IMO, Tivo still destroys any box you can get from your cable company (unless that box is, of course, a Tivo). Even with my Series 3 - which essentially has an 11 year old interface - is still far better than anything you'd get from Time Warner or the like. I'll be honest though, I haven't used the Premiere interface which is slightly different.


As for me, like I said I'm rocking Tivo with my Fios, and it's great. However, unfortunately I can't speak to multi-room viewing because while we have a TV in the bedroom, it's probably only been watched for a total of two hours in the 3.5 years we've lived here. However, here's what I can say about using a Tivo on Fios:

1) *knock on wood*, we didn't have any of the cablecard horror stories you hear so much about with other cable companies. Maybe that's just Fios and they're better about getting you the right thing, but we just had the installer come out and set everything up and it took as long as a normal setup.

2) No, we don't get VOD on our Tivo. No, I don't care. I've seen the selection and the interface for accessing that content, and it's clumsy and the selection of free stuff is crap. It doesn't compare in the least to the services I can get through Boxee anyway, so I meant it when I said I don't care about losing VOD.

3) From what I've heard about multi-room distribution with Tivo, it's not the most elegant solution in the world. It's more like file sharing where you start a transfer of the show you want and start it once you've received enough data. However, the thing Bruno brought up intrigues me! While the Engadget article shows that it's only a survey question for now, I'm pretty sure that other questions like this from Tivo have resulted in actual products.


In the end, I'm constantly urging my mom to switch out her Fios equipment for Tivos. The problem is that it's a significant initial investment. The cost of the hardware is pretty darn high. But once that's over, the monthly cost is right around what you'd pay for the Fios equipment, higher or lower depending on the configurations.

I'm on that TiVo survey. IIRC, that was one of the things that was presented as "we're pretty sure we're going to do this".

They'll only be 6 or 7 years late to the party, but better than never.

They've actually had this for quite a while as "Home Media Option", or something like that. This was apparently a new thing where there would just be one DVR, but small satellite slaves for the other TVs.

There were also questions about direct playback from other DVRs instead of the need to transfer the data first, among a number of other things, like new search options, both automatic and manual, being able to remotely program another DVR almost as if it were an extension of the TiVo, and, uh, a bunch of other stuff I can't remember at the moment.

They've really needed to focus on software development for a while. Hopefully this is an indication that they've realized that.

We currently don't have a DVR, but have had TiVo in the past and are returning to it. I'll be purchasing a Premiere with life time subscription for $486. I did not consider the DVRs from Comcast (current basic cable provider) or Verizon (current internet provider, 10mbit FiOS) as I'm planning on going OTA, and the ability to easily upgrade from the provided 320gb to 2tb of capicity.

From recent reading on the TiVo forums transfer speed is improved on the current boxes to the degree that you can start watching shortly after the copy has begun. But yes, this would require a TiVo for each TV.

I do know someone who is broadcasting the output of their DVR to other TVs in the house over coax on channel 1. Not sure of the details. Down side is that every TV is showing the same thing...don't know if that is a solution for you.

About 17 years ago my dad actually had our house set up like this. We had satellite, and the main home theater had a box of it's own, but there was one box in the basement that would broadcast to the three other spots in the house on channel 3 or whatever. We then had IR signal injectors on those three lines to control it. It was pretty cool stuff for the time, but it still meant watching the same thing on all three of those TVs.

Yeah, I'd read about the Tivo survey, but if they're just putting out feelers now, I wouldn't expect it to be available for 6-12 months, so if I switched providers now, I'd need to get an interim solution in place until then.


What's the UI for this? Like, suppose I have a multi-room DVR in my living room and a regular DVR in the bedroom (so someone watching TV in the bedroom can pause live TV, record stuff, etc.) Do the recordings on both devices show up separately from each other, or are they all pooled together in the interface? I remember from my ReplayTV days having to remember which device had which timers, which was annoying.

The great thing about the home distribution method that Dish uses is that there's just one box recording everything with multiple tuners, so the other TVs are all browsing the same central show library instead of having to switch between them. My hunch is that going to Verizon would be a step backward in this regard.


That's good to hear -- I'm sure they'd give me a 500GB as a prospective new customer. I'm less worried about capacity as I am with having to pay $20 for a multi-room DVR and $10 for a regular DVR to be able to pause live shows on two TVs. That significantly undercuts the cost savings of going to Verizon's "double play" package.


Hm, I didn't think about VOD. I agree that free VOD offerings are often crap, but that's still something to consider -- the landscape of who has which free content at a particular time changes often, so I'd prefer to have as many choices as possible.


Wow, that's sad -- my old ReplayTVs did better than that. Hearing that makes me think I'd probably be best off getting the Verizon multi-room setup initially and possibly moving to Tivo if/when they get their act together on multi-room viewing that doesn't suck.

It sounds like our multi-room convenience takes a hit no matter which direction we go, leaving aside the murky details of the future Tivo thing. I guess I'll have to do the math on exactly how much we'll save to figure out if that's worth it or not. It may just be that our setup (two tuners distributed across 4 TVs) is particularly suited to the Dish way of doing things.

Moxi has a pretty seamless whole-home solution. I have a Moxi three-tuner DVR in my living room and one Moxi Mate in the bedroom. The Mate can stream live TV from the DVR and also access all its recorded shows. The Mate has the exact same interface as the DVR. Channel changes and trick-play is slower on the Mate than the main DVR unit, but that's to be expected since the Mate has no internal storage. It also has no active cooling which is great for bedroom use.

I don't like the lack of support (no software updates since mid-2010). The Mate is also unable to schedule or delete recordings on the DVR, but an iPhone/iPad app exists which helps this shortcoming.

Other than those things, it's great. I pay $2.50/month for cable card rental (Cablevision) which costs much less than Cablevision's terrible DVRs. Moxi has a high up-front cost, but there is no monthly fee after that. They seem to hold their value well for resale on ebay.

Nice to see Moxi is still out there. I was tracking their progress for a possible replacement when ReplayTV was going downhill business wise.

Hm, somehow I'd never even heard of Moxi. That does seem to be a more elegant solution than the Verizon DVR or the Tivo multi-room feature, but the $300 price tag on the Moxi Mate is ludicrous. If that were closer to $100, I could stomach the $600 price tag on the main unit no problem.

Update: Okay, so the bundles bring the cost of the Mate down to $200. Still too high for what it does, but maybe not a bad option if the devices last a long time before they die or are obsolete.

I guess what I'm running into here is that we don't use our other TVs very much, so paying $200 for each of them seems crazy. (One of them is in the basement for when I'm folding laundry -- it's great to have, but I wouldn't pay that much to retain it if we changed our TV provider.) This reminds me of when I transitioned from analog cable to digital cable -- suddenly the need to pay for a box on every TV meant I needed to decide how much I needed each of my TVs. With Dish, I don't really need to make that choice, but with FiOS, it seems I would have to no matter what route I go for DVRs.

Because I don't live with it every day I'm having a difficult time remembering at the moment (also, my experience is with a 2nd box that's not a DVR with its own content), but I'm pretty sure the content shows in the same place on each box.

But also remember that you'll only get one DVR that can share content. With Tivo, all the boxes can share with each other, so you can the total storage capacity and tuners of all the boxes. Either way, you're not going to have your Dish setup with one central box handing everything out, but with Fios the multi-room viewing is limited to a single box's storage and tuners.


It appears that my input might soon carry a little less weight, sir. Everything I'm telling you is based on what I know of the Fios service from the past 20 months or so, since my mother moved into her home. Coincidentally, just today I noticed that Fios is starting to push out software updates to their HD DVR boxes that brings a new interface. I can tell you the old one was pretty lackluster. It also seems they're starting to ship new DVR boxes that aren't like the ones my mom received. So like I said, any insight I can give you might not be relevant to what you're going to be getting.


I would agree with you, but for the fact that ALL the free content on Fios VOD is terrible and unwatchable. Tivo not only has Amazon video and Netflix, but it integrates those services into the Premiere interface really well, from what I've heard. For example, in searches you'll get results from Amazon's library in addition to what's showing on your Tivo's guide data. I'm pretty sure the same applies for Netflix. Trust me, I don't miss the Fios VOD in the least, and I have so much video content available to me via Tivo, Netflix, and vudu, I couldn't possibly need another source for content, and I consume a ridiculous amount of content (seriously, it's too much, I think I'm a little addicted ).


Don't get me wrong, from what I hear it doesn't actually suck (see the post before yours), it's just that you can see the edges. It sounds like it's akin to renting a movie on Apple TV, where you need to let it buffer a little bit before it can start playing. The advantage Verizon has here is that while Tivo needs to use your network to transfer the content, Verizon uses the coax connection to talk to the other boxes. I'm honestly not sure how this works. Anyone know?


It sounded to me from your initial post that you were leaning more towards the side of using Verizon's equipment in the first place But you're right, it sounds like any setup is going to be a slight step down from your current situation. However, I will point out that having a DVR in each room means you'll go from "two tuners for the entire house" to "two tuners for the entire house and two for each of three TVs." And that's for Fios. Like I said, with Tivo, you'd essentially have eight tuners for the entire house AND their combined storage.

I also can't stress enough the superior interface of the Tivo. It is miles apart from what you get with the Fios UI in every aspect. Even fast forwarding and rewinding with the Fios equipment is...unresponsive is the only word I can think of at the moment. It'll constantly mess up like that. Tivo also still has the fantastic season pass manager, which can now be organized via web interface (a great feature).

As you can see, I'm pushing the Tivo route, but like you said, there's no telling when or if they'll be releasing that multi-room product. I guess we'll have to see, and in the end I don't believe there's any commitment to renting the Fios equipment. I'm pretty sure that at any time you can simply return it and get Tivo or Moxi or whatever.

BTW, the return process for Fios is soooo much better than most cable companies. When we got rid of Cox Cable, we had to drive 40 miles out to a headquarters and stand in line for half an hour to return the equipment, which seemed to take forever and involved a long, annoying process. Shortly after getting Fios, my mom realized she wasn't going to use one of the TVs we'd set it up on, and the process for returning the box was to take the box, power cable, and remote to the nearest UPS store (which was a mile away), and put it on the counter. They said thank you and I left. Super easy.

Yeah, that's a pretty ridiculous price. However, it doesn't have the monthly contract, so you make up that cost very quickly.

How do you like the interface, Rob?



I was just thinking about the possibility of that multi-room Tivo product. While I think that the actual technology is greatly needed from a usability standpoint, what is really necessary from Tivo is a better pricing model. Currently, there's a slight reduction in contract price for additional boxes in your home, up to something like four boxes. Really, it's not enough of a price cut.

I'm wondering how they'd price the plan for such a product. Would they require that same reduced-cost plan for each "dumb" box you added to your system? Would it just be a single price for the main Tivo box? If so, the savings cost over the Fios DVR would be huge.

I'm very happy with my TiVo's ability to let me suck stuff out (via iTiVo), transcode it, and dump it on my phone. I regularly use TiVo's built-in Pandora support. I'm mostly happy with TiVo's ability to stream content from my Mac (via pyTiVoX).

What's the status of these sorts of functionality with other DVRs?

As far as I know, absolutely abysmal (to non-existant) unless you've got a home-brewed solution like MythTV, SageTV, MS Media Center (with hacks) or Media Portal.

It's funny -- I used to copy and transcode from my ReplayTV back in the day, and when I joined the Dish Network DVR club, I lamented the loss of that functionality. But with hard drives on the DVRs getting so large, and not wanting to watch recordings on a small smartphone screen, it's not nearly as important to me as it used to be. I used to try to build up a giant library of archived shows, but then I realized I was never watching them, and now I can get many of the ones I'd care to from Netflix instant.

Warning: If your cable provider decides (like mine, Time Warner) that everything that can legally be restricted must be restricted, this means that the only thing you can get off of your TiVo is broadcast network programming. (Though you can get that off even if you received it over cable and not the air.)

Same here, and it was so easy off a 4500 or 5000 series unit too. Load up a java app that emulated a ReplayTV, pull them over the network, then fire up a program that understood all the commercial skip markers. Few minor tweaks, and I could export a commercial free archive copy of a show with little effort. And all without any hacks to the ReplayTV to add a network card and other such things TiVo owners of the time were doing.

The auto archiving of the Java emulator was really useful. I bought a low end ReplayTV unit with I think 40GB of storage. It was enough to handle a few days of recordings, and then the Java program could kick in to pull them off and stash them on my home server/NAS. Because of how well the streaming worked back to the ReplayTV, the experience was pretty much the same watching locally, or pulling the show back in from the archive.

Oh, and the internet TV show sharing was also handy. I missed a few shows due to power outages or other issues. A quick visit to an online site helped me coordinate with other ReplayTV owners, and allowed me to pull in the show from their unit.

It's not a wonder ReplayTV was sued, the tech was just too good :-)

In practice, with my Comcast cable, they copy-protect everything on the premium channels (HBO, etc.), and they seem to probabilistically copy-protect content from some HD standard cable channels with no particular rhyme or reason. All the SD cable channels are unprotected.

All that protection must be working wonderfully. Pretty much any show is available in a 720p rip the same night it airs - within minutes. For people on the West coast, usually before the show airs. It doesn't matter if it's network or premium either.

Personally, as long as someone is broadcasting ATSC, I won't be paying for network programming.

To be clear, my comment wasn't hypothetical. I have a TiVo, and 100% of the content that wasn't broadcast by my local ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, or PBS stations is restricted by Time Warner.

They apparently also do something that cripples the TiVo's ability to record suggestions.

Yes. Shockingly, DRM is irrelevant to those that are explicitly trying to get around it, but prevents those of us who just want reasonably access to our media from having it.

I'm pretty sure that that's never been shown before.

Looking further at the pricing details, and factoring in either Verizon's monthly DVR/STB fees or a lifetime-activated Tivo, we'd end up paying significantly more despite the bundle savings. The Verizon TV plans are priced competitively enough, but once you add $30-$40 for the multi-room DVR and additional set-top boxes, it's a wash, and that's even if we drop down to 3 TVs. Combined with the need to get into a new 2 year contract, I think we'll probably stand pat.

Maybe in six months or so the new whizbang Tivo thing will be out and it'll make more sense, but it seems to me that Dish still has the best setup for anyone who has multiple TVs but doesn't necessarily need to be watching three or four things at once. The prospect of upgrading my game room TV to HD complicates things (the 2nd output of the Dish DVR only does SD) but I think Dish still comes out ahead price-wise if I decide to add another HD DVR in the other room.

Directv's offering allows one DVR to serve the whole house. Other rooms have sat tuners that can tap the recordings on the mothership.

One thing to note, the fine print says "Limit one remote viewing per HD DVR at at time." Bummer! Or maybe not, depends on needs.

Fortunately, Fios doesn't seem to do this.


Sorry, I re-read your post, and for some reason I initially thought that for some reason you HAD to move to Fios for TV and use their equipment or Tivo's. Not sure why I thought that. But yes, for your use-case, I guess it makes sense to stay with what you have. Personally, I can't ever give up the Tivo interface. Besides, none of the competing products make those *bleep* *bloop* sounds

The main interface is very similar to the PS3's cross media bar. You have channels, categories of programming (Movies, sports, HD, etc.), games, DLNA, recorded content, and settings on a horizontal bar. When in one of those categories, a vertical bar of your options appears.

This means that channels are not presented in a grid view by default. You can switch to a grid view, but I don't find the need to ever do that. The normal XMB-style interface suits me fine. That said, there is simply too much on the horizontal bar. Live programming is categorized into about 10 different types that cannot be hidden. This makes going from one side of the bar to the other needlessly long. The only category I've ever used is the HD one since my cable operator sticks most HD channels in the 700s. Browsing with the HD category just shows those channels, which is handy.

The Moxi and Mate are DLNA compliant. I have used them with PS3 Media Server running in OS X and it works as well as any other DLNA device. I have Boxee Boxes, so I obviously don't use the DLNA feature at all. Boxee is just a million times better.

It could be one of the places Sony got inspiration for their UI, since Moxi predates the PS3 and PSP. I didn't know they were till around After visiting their booth at CES in 2005 and seeing that their announced/demonstrated partner plans didn't work out, I thought they had closed up shop a few years later.

Can the Moxi do picture-in-picture at all? I managed to find a Verizon FiOS bundle that would save me about $30/month with their equipment, but then I thought to look for PIP functionality, which is absent. In fact, I haven't seen any other providers do PIP, which is surprising considering the fact that the DVRs all have multiple tuners now.

No PIP on the Moxi. All outputs aren't active at the same time either. You can't output HDMI and component video simultaneously, for example.

Bummer. Would it be possible to rig up one of the Moxi Mates as a second input to a PIP TV? The problem with that setup is usually a lack of IR codes to control the devices independently, but I thought I'd ask.

You could definitely do that, but you guessed right. There is no way to assign remote codes to one box and not the other. The DVR and Mate use identical remote controls.

There are physical buttons on the front of the units. Off the top of my head, they have a d-pad with select button and the menu button. This should allow you to do almost anything without the remote control.

Just so you know, I'm not a Moxi evangelist. The only reason I settled on it was the superior multi-room setup. I wanted to rent only one cablecard, and this was the only way to do this (with a CE device). My other option was two Tivo Premieres with lifetime which would have cost more money up-front and require two cablecards. The Premiere was also getting poor reviews for its UI speed at the time of my Moxi purchase.

I'm surprised that Tivo still hasn't gotten the Premiere working smoothly. I'm also not fond of the ads in menus and during trickplay my friend's S3 Tivos have. The Moxi is 100% ad-free and trickplay on the DVR is fast. It's not as fast as Tivo, but it's faster than the HR20-23 series of DirecTV DVRs.

I'm anxious to see what comes from Microsoft in the form of a more consumer-oriented DVR solution. I'm also up for seeing what Tivo is going to do, but I'm really against paying them gobs of money and then having ads fed to me. I don't anticipate Moxi coming out with another retail box. It seems Arris bought Moxi from Digeo to get their IP. This 6-tuner DVR/media gateway for cable operators is the first product to come from this union.

I don't think I mentioned it yet, but Moxi lacks a wishlist-type function. This could be a deal-breaker for some.

I'm surprised that this type of device at this price point doesn't include multiple IR codesets. The issue is pretty easy to solve in any case, though not necessarily for free or cheaply.

Right off the bat, my first recommendation would be to use a remote that support RF communication with a base-station that has IR transmitters. SUch as one of URC's Complete Control line along with its MRF base. That way you can use stick-on emitters to each device and both will receive the same kinds of codes, while still addressing them individually via the remote setup.

Does anyone know if Tivo has ironed out those speed issues with the Premiere UI yet? I'd heard the same complaints at first, but I was under the impression that this had been addressed. Wasn't it due to something like one of the CPUs/cores not being utilized for some reason?

I've never been certain why some things are so slow on the Tivo UI. I would think that if you have a box capable of recording two HD streams while playing back a third, it would be more than capable of, for example, recalculating your recording schedule when you change the priority of a season pass (typically the slowest the Tivo ever gets).

But it sounds like the Premiere UI is even slower. I wonder if any of that is due to the live TV playback in the menus, which is the first thing I'd turn off if I had a Premiere...

Recording and playback don't use the CPU, but rely on dedicated silicon. A database operation though is going to hit the CPU - what's in there anyway?

I just upgraded from a URC remote to a Harmony 670, and though I'm not thrilled with the Harmony, it's certainly a step up from the older URC I had. The Complete Control lineup seems very steeply priced and terribly designed, and probably work with my PS3 without some more hackery. It would solve the PIP problem, but by the time I get there, I've negated the cost savings from switching, which is the whole reason I opened up this can of worms.

If I'm willing to drop down to just the multi-room DVR and one additional set-top box, I can get my bill down by about $40 a month, and get faster FiOS internet service as well, so PIP might have to go -- it certainly ain't worth $40/month.

The one thing I'm curious about -- do the regular FiOS STBs send output over multiple outputs (where one of the outputs is coax) at the same time? If so, I could locate the main multi-room DVR in our living room, put the regular STB in my game room, and then run coax from the STB in the game room up to our bedroom. Then, with a RF/IR remote extender, the signal from the regular STB would be available on the TV downstairs (over RCA or S-video) and upstairs (over the coax.) Would that work?

A Broadcom BCM7038 SoC, which incorporates a 300MHz MIPS CPU. The Premiere has a 400MHz dual-core MIPS.

Honestly, I simply cannot remember if it outputs on multiple connections. I want to say that it does. However, I've never hooked one up with a coax output before, so I don't know if that's any different.

I've never used PiP. I'm curious, what do you use it for? I can see it being useful if you're switching your viewing between two channels, and want to know when the other one gets back from a commercial break. Personally, I tend to only watch one thing at a time, and I'd estimate that other than sports and awards shows, 99% of my TV watching is time-shifted, making PiP kind of impossible (or at least useless). Even when it comes to sports and awards shows, I'm usually watching on a delay if nobody else watching minds.


Ah, wasn't aware that was how Tivo did it. Still, from what I'm reading, it's looking like Tivo hasn't turned on the dual-core functionality of their Premiere boxes' CPUs. There are lots of frustrated users out there.

The more I think about it, the more excited I am at the prospect of that possible multi-room Tivo product. I'm extremely curious what they're working on. Conceivably, the remote boxes (as opposed to the central box) wouldn't need a coax line, so they could go anywhere your home network could reach. For example, we can't have a TV in our office because the coax line in here is being used for our modem.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for any more news on that potential product. I didn't feel a need to upgrade to the Premiere as it doesn't give a Series 3 or TivoHD owner much added functionality, but a true multi-room product is something I'd definitely be interested in purchasing.

Bitt, how do I get on that survey? I've been a Tivo customer for 10 years now, but I don't get those emails...

There are two basic use cases:

1. There are two live sporting events I'm interested in watching at the same time. I can pull them both up and when one goes to commercial or is at halftime, I switch to the other.

2. My wife is watching something, and there's a game on that I want to watch. I'll let her watch her thing with audio and I'll watch on the other half without audio (because that's the kind of guy I am.) This obviously changes if it's a playoff game or whatever.

But if you're recording both channels, that situation is largely unimportant. You can just jump back and forth between programs all you want and skip the commercials.

Unless of course you want to actually view two things on the same screen at the same time as Tony mentions. Personally, I get bothered by watermarks and other on-screen graphics, so a PIP rect would probably drive me up the wall.

It's more convenient to be able to stream the second channel to a device like an iPad.

My old series 2 Tivo outputs on all outputs simultaneously.

Ah yes, I've applied to that every once and a while, but of course have never gotten in. Darn...

My decision has been made. I've got Verizon coming out in a couple weeks to install FiOS TV and a simple two-TV setup (one multi-room DVR, one regular STB to connect to it.) I'll connect the other TVs to the additional outputs of those as needed. I'll end up saving money while getting more HD channels, faster internet, and hopefully still have a good DVR interface to work with, but we'll see about that.

One annoying thing I wasn't prepared for is the complexity of the billing, and the obfuscation involved in hiding the true cost from the end user. I'm sort of used to these things from my dealings with Comcast, and to some extent all providers do it, but it was particularly difficult with Verizon to compare plans and figure out the real cost of their plans. They give you all sorts of different credits for different time periods, and then when things expire, you might or might not be able to get those credits renewed.

I ended up going with their middle-tier "Double Play" internet and TV bundle. The normal price of the services without the bundle credit is $119.99, but they offer $25 off for 24 months, and also $10 off for the first six months. That's all before paying for the equipment -- which costs $19.99 for the DVR and $8 for the other set-top box.

So, if I just look at the first six months, my bill is very low -- about $110/month before taxes and whatnot. But, averaged out over the 24-month period (during which I doubt they'd give me any additional discount) it ends up being closer to $120. This is still around $30 less than my combined bill now between the two providers, so it's still worth doing, but doing all the math to figure that out (and then comparing it to the Triple Play deals with phone service) ended up being a real hassle.

Then, as if that wasn't enough of a hassle, I got distracted by a "Free multi-room DVR for life" deal that would have been awesome, but is only available in the NYC area (I would have known this if I'd read the fine print.)

The bright side is that there's no contract commitment at all, so I should have some leverage if my bill ends up going up anytime soon. The hassle involved will be frustrating, but if I can save $30/month and go from 15/2 to 25/25 internet, it's worth it.

I'll report back with my findings in a few weeks.

Any caps on the internet? The way billing is going today, it's the caps that I end up looking at when comparing service, because depending on what you want to do and when you want to do it, the difference in download speed can be irrelevant.

50 Megabit down with no caps is $200/month where I am now just for internet (cable). That's for a business plan, as there's no such thing as unlimited consumer/home internet in Ontario from any provider.

As far as Fibre, you can get 25/7 if you're lucky here. But capped at 75GB a month and starting at $72 per month plus at least 13% tax. You can save a bit by bundling, but then you're paying through the nose for other services that are a fraction of the cost elsewhere. 120GB additional bandwidth for $15 plus tax.

Supposedly a new 50/10 with 100GB cap coming for Ontario from Bell starting at $111 per month.

The other thing with Bell is you're lucky to ever get their advertised speed for any appreciable part of the month. My 7 megabit advertised connection right now with our local cable provider gets a solid 8 megabits any time of day, every day, every month.

I'm not aware of any usage caps or throttles being imposed on FiOS users, although I can't say for certain they don't exist. I know that I'm getting pretty much what they say I should, and I'll hopefully get around 25/25 when my order comes through.

When my Fios is working, I always get the speed I'm paying for (20/5), and sometimes I get even more down (at the moment it's topping out around 26).


As long as I've had Fios, I've never had any cap problems, and I'm certainly not light on the bandwidth. I wish I'd monitored how much I've been using, but I know I've downloaded many dozens of GBs in a month and never gone over.


The plan I'm hoping to get for the university I'm working for is the Fios 150/35 for $200/month.

Must be from a smaller local provider -- none of the big companies offer fibre.

B(h)ell offers "Fibe", which is their marketing term for VDSL, but not fibre.

Cheers

I read the same thing elsewhere, perhaps DSLReports. I definitely trust your word over Bell's. Bell however, claim in plain English and black and white, that "Fibe" stands for "Fibre Optic"

Sure, perhaps it does. But that does not mean that you get fibre when you sign up for "fibe". They don't say that, and nobody does.

Most "fibe" customers are serviced from little bulgy brown boxes, usually located at the end of a fibre run, within 2km of the end users. Copper pairs are used from the box ("remote") to the customers.

But sometimes the remotes don't even have fibre backhaul, instead using bonded pairs (copper) back to the network.

So they (Bhell) figure, there's fibre somewhere in our network, so let's call the entire service fibe. More honest people prefer to spell it as "fib".

Speaking of Bhell's "fib" service -- this past winter a crew bolted one of those bulgy brown boxes on to the neighbourhood distribution panel (a larger fin-shaped brown box). And this past week another crew actually hooked up power (240V) to it.

But it's still an empty brown box right now. I guess another crew will eventually arrive to populate it with the "remote" electronics for VDSL. There is no fibre anywhere near it.

This stuff is being deployed for "IP TV" service; the internet add-on is secondary (in Bhell's mind). I'm hoping to eventually get a line on the remote with my teksavvy service.

Cheers

Wow, that's more than a little dishonest, but you've clearly nailed the situation, Mark.

Fios, on the other hand, is adamant about "fiber to the home." They clearly hate setting apartment buildings up the way that mine is, and in this case they were held back by the developer or building management company who didn't want them to set up the way they'd like. Fortunately I'm still getting the same result.

I was very impressed at the speed of Verizon's fiber rollout. Initially it seemed like I'd be waiting years to get it at my house, then one day I saw the fleets of Verizon trucks with spools of orange conduit driving around my neighborhood. Within a few weeks, I got the email notification that it was available at my house, and a few weeks later, the guy was digging the trench in my yard to run fiber to my basement.

I'm also quite impressed by the look and feel of the new FiOS DVRs:



The chaptering with thumbnails and guide browsing interfaces look superior to what I have now. I just hope the multi-room stuff works nicely.

So, my FiOS install occurred yesterday. The installer didn't have any of the new DVRs, but I was able to swap the one he gave me at a Verizon retail store free of charge.

The new firmware for the media guide/DVR stuff hasn't rolled out to many markets yet, so the version I've got is a bit of a step back from the Dish Network VIP722. The UI is just a small notch above what I've seen from Comcast cable boxes, and the scheduling / conflict resolution features aren't very robust. The upgraded version shown in the video above looks like it should improve on at least some of these problems.

Losing picture-in-picture is a bummer, and losing the ability to pause / rewind live TV on the additional TVs is also quite a drag. The multi-room functionality works fine, and seeking is faster than I expected -- a tiny bit slower than what I'm used to on the Dish, but still totally usable.

The VOD selection is actually very good. It probably isn't what you get from Comcast, but is way more than what was on Dish. Good selection of network shows, movies, etc. that will be nice to have if we miss a show or two.

The one BIG step up is the FiOS picture quality. They aren't recompressing the feeds (as the satellite operators have to due to limited bandwidth on the satellite feeds) so the PQ is very, very nice. I had read that this was the case, but it's even nicer than I thought it'd be.

In the end, I'm saving $30 a month (about 25% off my old bill), so even if things stay as they as they are, I think this was worth doing. If the upgraded firmware delivers on its promises, I think I'll be even happier with my decision.

Thanks to all who chimed with advice. I'll probably post an update here when the new firmware rolls out.

Man, this aspect of the switch never crossed my mind for some reason. I think it's been so long since I last used satellite that I'd forgotten how much better the picture quality is. Welcome to the world of the uncompressed! Short of OTA, I'm pretty sure Fios has the best quality out there (it might equal OTA).

Less compressed, surely?

I don't know, they've certainly touted "uncompressed" in the past.

Right. Verizon's still getting (mostly) high-bitrate MPEG-2 streams from the content providers, it's just that they're not recompressing it the way the satellite providers need to. I don't know exactly what bitrate FiOS is sending out their HD streams in, but it certainly *looks* uncompressed to my eye. I can't see any artifacts the way I can on Dish/DirecTV signals.

MPEG-2 *is* a compression scheme.
So "less compressed", rather than "uncompressed".

R.I.P. Voom

Uh, that's what I said. Verizon gets compressed feeds and doesn't recompress them. The satellite providers get compressed feeds then recompress them.

Ah, I see. So digital OTA isn't MPEG2? What is it?

I think OTA signals are, in fact, MPEG-2 -- I was just saying that FiOS doesn't turn around and recompress the compressed feed. In theory, FiOS HD and OTA HD should be equal in bandwidth and picture quality.

Precisely. OTA terrestrial HD signals are MPEG-2, typically at 19 Mb/sec. The satellite and cable providers often convert to MPEG-4 (nothing wrong with that) and reduce the bandwidth (and that's where the problems begin).

My parents used to have AT&T U-verse (TV over DSL). They moved and can't get U-verse in their new place, but it comes with free (analog) basic cable. Solution? They have an OTA antenna to get HD local channels and the free cable for what it's got. My father, he of the massively maladjusted TV settings who wouldn't know contrast from brightness or color from tint, was blown away by how much better terrestrial HD is than the same channels through AT&T U-verse.

Correct, US based OTA DTV is MPEG2 based. ATSC-2 standard includes support for H.264 (MPEG4 AVC), but it isn't in use anywhere yet. Bitrate in the US is 19.4mbit, though many channels will divide this up for multiple streams, (IE, the whole 13.1, 13.2 13.3 sub channel setup) when they aren't using all the bandwidth on the main channel.

My earlier Voom comment came from their high quality over satellite. I made the switch to them from Dish back in 2005, and the difference was pretty amazing. Around the time of shutdown, Voom was working to convert everything over to H.264 to be able to recompress the incoming feeds without introducing visible artifacts, thus allowing them to add more channels. Having just a few months of Voom was enough to make me not want to go back to a provider that recompresses everything to the point of artifacting.

Okay, that's what I thought. Then people are just being contrary and nit-picky. Fine, less compressed. But for all intents and purposes, since you can't get a signal that is uncompressed, and if every paid-provider is giving you re-compressed video, I'm going to continue to call Verizon's product uncompressed.

...and then administer a swift kick to the groin of any nerd who nitpicks.

Side tangent here, do modern video cameras have an equivalent to RAW for picture cameras? I know there are lossless codecs used for preserving quality while editing, but I've never looked to see if that is to preserve the existing compression quality coming in from the camera, or if it's to preserve the uncompressed level while applying some data reduction.

The Red cameras appear to do lossy compression, but not sure if these are truly representative of what one might find across the board.

I've never heard of a consumer digital motion camera shooting any kind of uncompressed video, raw or otherwise. It would be terribly expensive in terms of storage space and write speed.

Isn't everything right now pretty much using AVC exclusively?

Apparently not consumer-grade cameras.

Do the RED cameras shoot uncompressed?

Back to Fios for a moment:

I just finished setting up a brand new wireless router. I went with a Netgear N750 because it seemed to have pretty much everything.

The problem came when I tried to hook it all up. I already knew it was a challenge to connect my own router to Fios, and I knew I'd receive little to no support from phone support, but it ended up being a much more difficult process than I'd anticipated, and I have no less than three devices involved in getting internet to my computers.

First, I have the VDSL modem that baffles 95% of Fios phone support technicians. Then I have the Actiontec router, for which I eventually read how to put it in bridge mode, which was a little tricky but thankfully did the job. At the end I have the Netgear.

It was a PITA, but it was worth it. The Netgear is fantastic, and every computer in my home is getting 20Mbps or more to the net. I'll be testing computer to computer speeds at some point, but for now I'm just glad it's working and it's time for some well-earned dinner

Bridge mode? This reads to me that you are doing wireless between the Actiontec router and the Netgear N750, which I would imagine to be less then ideal. Am I misunderstanding your configuration?

Almost certainly. Most ISP-provided CPE routers will either consume an IP address themselves or function as a simple Ethernet-to-DSL adapter. In networking lingo, such an adapter that does nothing but convert one LAN protocol to another is known as a bridge.

Bridge mode on a DSL modem disables all the routing functions, letting his Netgear handle that. It's a little bit of manual work since a PPPoE username and password needs to be entered into the router, and sometimes providers won't give this info out.

That makes sense, thanks for the explanations.

So, yeah, about the FiOS networking setup... I went through the process of making the FiOS modem/router into a bridge a long time ago due to the general crapitude of the FiOS Actiontec modem. It's not the worst I've ever seen, but it's not what I want being my main router, and the wifi strength is terrible (I've also since added 802.11n, which it lacks.)

Anyway, Verizon set-top boxes do not like being behind a non-standard router. If you do the bridge setup exactly right (the instructions for this are pretty tedious, far beyond what you'd normally assume would be necessary) you can get it to the point where the STBs can call out for guide data and view VOD, but with most of the setups, you really have to do serious hackery (such as adding a *third* router just to serve up a particular address to the FiOS router's WAN port, and telnetting into the FiOS router when it boots up to add a default route, which needs to be repeated each time it reboots) to get the remote DVR feature working.

It's all so needlessly complicated. I still haven't gotten the remote DVR thing working yet -- I'm not willing to give in and add a third router just to get it going, but I may have to. Definitely one of the more disappointing aspects of my switch so far.

Bitt, I think you're talking about something different from Phoenix42. There is nothing wireless in the setup I described above (except for the LAN of the Netgear). (*edit* I re-read your post, Bitt, and what you're describing is what I understood, but you were confirming his suspicions of wireless, which was not what I'm doing. I think I get what you're saying, though */edit*)

And Tom, it's not the DSL modem that's bridged, its the Fios Actiontech router.

From how I understand it, all I'm doing is completely bypassing the Fois router by telling it to bridge the WAN ethernet with whatever I plug into a LAN port. That's all I really wanted it to do anyway.

Tony, you're right about it being a pain. I haven't checked to see if the guide data is still working on my bedroom set top box. If I had to guess, I'd say it isn't.

But that wouldn't matter much to me. It hasn't worked for nearly four years, and we don't really care. We rarely watch that TV anyway, and when we do we usually know what channel number we need.

You pretty much described the reasons I've been forgoing my Fios router since I first got Fios. The default router is better than most, but still short on features. I at least need N, and gigabit ethernet should be nice in the future.

Ok, now I'm just really confused by your setup, even after reading the explanation in the YouTube thread again.

So if I understand this right, you have:

1. a VDSL modem that carries the signal in from the wall, and provides a single LAN port. This is already in bridge mode, and doesn't do any routing. Who makes this?

2. A separate Actiontec router with no DSL capabilities, that plugs in to the VSDL modem, that you also have in bridge mode. Normally this would also do routing. (Every Actiontec unit I've come across in the past has always been a combination DSL modem and router)

3. A Netgear router acting as your actual home router, receiving a public IP on it's WAN port.

Mostly curious about all this, since I am looking to move into a FiOS area in 2 months, and it may be in an area they can't run fibre all the way to the apartment. I would like to keep my Airport as my main router, to continue to be able to use Wake on Demand from the internet.

I meant "almost certainly" he was misunderstanding.

Which I was, and Bitt was wording my inability to understand nicely.

Umm, but it's not nitpicking. Uncompressed HD is between 1.5 and 3 Gbps/s, unless your FIOS is running at that speed then it's compressed. It might not be re-compressed, but it's still compressed.

What's wrong with trying to use the correct terminology?

Maybe we should use the terms recompressed and unrecompressed.

Sorry, I know it's a weird setup, and like I said, it's one that confuses even the phone support people at Verizon. You should hear the reactions I get when I tell them I have a DSL modem.

Anyway, yes, so far you've mostly got it down. The weird thing is, it appears that this VDSL modem (a Zyxel model - this is the closest image I could find, but it doesn't have an antenna) it looks like originally it was also a router. It has a telephone jack and four ethernet ports, but it appears that it's permanently set up in bridge mode and doesn't do any routing...


The Actiontec is definitely not a DSL modem. The Actiontec's WAN port is connected to one (any) of the ethernet ports on the Zyxel modem. I believe that in many/most Fios installs, the Actiontec is actually set up to receive its data through the coax connection unless programmed otherwise. The instructions I followed assumed a coax connection, but since I'm connecting to the modem I'm of course connected through ethernet. The coax is still used in ethernet setups to get guide data and VOD.


Exactly. In the admin area, I can tell that the Netgear its self is getting the public IP address all the way through the other two pieces of equipment. To be honest, I'm not confident I set up the Actiontec correctly, but essentially I'm getting the result I wanted so I'm not questioning it

I will note that I just checked my bedroom TV and the guide data is gone again. Oh well, I'd rather have a rock-solid network than guide data on a TV we watch for 10 minutes every year.


It's possible they've set it up my way, but like I've said earlier, they make every attempt to set it up with fiber to the home. And like I've said a few times already, this setup is apparently so uncommon that the majority of tier one phone support people haven't been trained on it yet. I was relieved when the lady I spoke to yesterday was familiar with my setup and didn't think I was an idiot when I mentioned my DSL modem.

Also, if you DO have my setup, I'm not so sure you'll need the Actiontec router in the middle there. For the entire time I've had Fios, I just had my own router (an Airport Extreme most of the time) plugged right into the modem. This time, though, that didn't seem to be working, and I needed my network to be up quickly so I tried this method.

Unfortunately, it looks like Tony wasn't kidding when he described the great lengths you need to go to for getting Actiontec to deliver guide data to your STBs. I thought I was set up to do so, but clearly it didn't work. Hopefully Tivo will come out with their multi-room product soon and make this point moot.

Yeah. Here's the dslreports.com FAQ on the eight (!) different configurations people generally use (it looks like your insane setup isn't one of them.) I've got option #5 going, but I'm trying to work through the suggestions in this monster thread to get remote DVR working.

Nothing, but it's a silly thing to argue about with respect to Verizon's marketing. They're not recompressing it, so it's uncompressed... by them. I doubt many people in the world have ever seen a truly uncompressed HD stream with their own eyes, so picking on this particular example of marketingspeak seems like a waste of time.

See also, arguments about the number of HD channels each carrier has... The lying there is even worse.

I'm getting pretty excited about these new, seemingly more solid rumors of the new Tivo products.

This would be a perfect setup for my mother, but it all depends on how they price the monthly plan:

- If you only pay the usual price for the main box, terrific!
- If you pay a little more for the main box, that wouldn't be too objectionable.
- If you pay the same for the main box and something like $5 for each additional one, it starts becoming a tougher sell.
- If you pay the usual price for each box, with their normal multi-room discount for the other boxes, then there really wouldn't be much point to buying these products other than the [presumably] cheaper price for the "Preview" boxes.

Either way, I'd be excited for the four tuner box alone. I still run into conflicts, especially on Thursday nights when the networks seem to schedule everything.

I always forget that not everyone can record 8 things at once.

Based on the current drivel that is passing as entertainment, I can't imagine ever needing to record 8 things at once.

I can't imagine ever needing to record anything, much less actually watch it.

tanstaafl.

One big advantage of recording things, especially with a fast-seeking PVR (as opposed to tape), is that one can skim through uninteresting bits, and skip the adverts entirely.

This suddenly makes some TV content bearable again, though here we mostly watch documentaries and the like from PBS, BBC, and CBC. Plus hockey, of course.

Cheers

That was going to be my response to Doug, but then, we only get hockey OTA from NBC, whose coverage stinks.

I know I've said this before, but I quit television cold turkey when I moved to Mexico. Keep in mind that before I moved, I was a 40+ hour a week TiVo addict. I have a cable TV subscription with 70 or 80 channels, but the only reason I have it is for the 7 mbps cable modem internet connection, the fastest it is possible to have here. Service is good, I only lose connectivity two or three times a week, frequently the outages last less than an hour. Oddly enough, it is possible to have just the cable modem without the TV subscription, but that costs about 40% more than the TV + modem package.

No doubt your tired of hearing me say this, but it is such a relief not to be tied to the idiot box, the sense of freedom is exalting.

tanstaafl.

It's a cheap high, and I know it, but it's a habit I just can't shake. Is there TV methadone?

Meh, I don't want to kick the habit! I can tell you, after working a couple 15 hour days last week, all I wanted to do was lean back in the stressless rocker and watch Veronica Mars for the second time through...

I'm with you if I didn't have cable I would go nuts from the silence. I am mostly just surfing the net but have the TV on in the background.

The most number of games that I've been interested in that were on at the same time has been two, so my point still stands

Yes!

There's one issue I hadn't thought of, though, and it isn't made clear in the Engadget article (and I'm not reading the press release - I'm sleepy enough already and I don't have 30 minutes here). Naturally, the Previews can't act as DVRs, and I understand that, but does this mean that they also can't timeshift?

I don't know what I thought would happen. I guess I thought the Preview might use whatever buffer you'd get from the Q, so you'd be able to pause or rewind/replay, but if I can't do any of that then unless the Preview box costs $50-100 and creates no increase in the Tivo service fee, there's no chance I'm picking one up.

A Tivo without timeshifting would be a sad sight indeed!

Do you not own a radio? Maybe even an MP3 player?

Is not the content completely different?

Not significantly, but does it really matter if the goal is just to break the silence?

There's a little news about the Tivo Elite and Preview boxes here. There's a link at the end of that article with a little info and the first picture I've seen of the Preview box. Now I just really hope Tivo brings the Preview box to market.

I do hope the Preview box can stream from a Premiere and not just an Elite. And hopefully it can also stream Netflix etc like a regular Tivo.

Oh, and I'd like a pony.

Apparently there's even more to the Elites than previously thought. In addition to the dual-core support and 1GB of RAM, it seems the software is seeing an update, but I haven't seen word on what that means...

The Elite on its own is not enough of an incentive to get me to upgrade from my Series 3, despite the far greater capabilities. I'm waiting for them to release the Preview, at which point I'll be buying one of each, and I suspect my mother would buy an Elite and three previews

I have a Google Alert set up for news on the Preview boxes...

Too funny.

Engadget is reporting on the Gizmo Lover's article which is a summary of this thread in the Tivo Community forums.

If a Preview can stream from a Premiere I'm in for one, and a second TV. The in-laws are all on cable or satellite co DVRs and I don't see them changing their habits anytime soon, at least not with that type of up front costs. It doesn't help that they think I'm nuts for going OTA + streaming...

Well, the Preview units are finally going to some people's houses. Too bad RCN is awful (at least from everything I've heard from their customers).

The worrying thing is that the Preview units cannot pause, FF, and REW live TV. That's an issue for me. I guess I can understand why this is the case, but I was under the impression that these things were using the Elite to handle the tuners, so why can't it just pause, FF, and REW on the Elite and send that to the Preview? I guess I need more info on what's going on in the Preview/Elite relationship.

Besides, there's probably a price point at which I won't care about that issue anymore. I'd probably place that point at around $99 or less, though frankly I can't see why the Preview would be any more than that. They seem to have less smarts than most other set top boxes like the Apple TV or Roku, and certainly less than the Boxee Box.

I guess we'll find out more when Tivo finally offers this up to everyone else. I hope they don't have some sort of long-term exclusivity deal with RCN. That would just be stupid, considering how few people can even get RCN.

TiVo used to be the sort of company that wowed you with its products. Now... not so much.

I suppose that used to be the case 8-10 years ago, but they've simply done the bare minimum since first launching, and they've essentially only updated their software once in the last decade.

I still love Tivo and maintain that there's no better way to experience TV if you watch a lot of it, but the experience could be so much better.

It really irritated me when their press announcement for the Tivo Premiere was preceded by teasers claiming "Inventing the DVR was just a warm-up." Regardless of whether that's true or not, it was a huge let-down when they announced such a minor iteration on their product. I think the Preview box is far more impressive.