FIOS MRV commerical

Yeah, that feature does exist with FiOS and has for some time - I've had it since last year when I signed up. It works remarkably well. The commercial you're talking about is a bit deceptive, however. Right now the MR DVR does not allow for feeding of HD programming, and in the commercial it's clear that he's watching an HD feed. You can only feed out SD programming - for now. A new s/w release is set to come out very soon (I keep hearing August/September) that will allow for feeding of HD programming. When that happens, I'm going to upgrade my SD STB on my second TV to an HD box.

Apart from that, though, everything else alluded to in the commercial is correct. You can currently feed to up to 6 different TVs (three at the same time), and you can pause/stop playback on one TV, and resume it from another. It's really slick.

Also, this feature allows you to feed digital music and pictures from your PCs to the TV with the DVR (this will soon - again, part of the same s/w release - streaming video, and feeds from internet sources as well - e.g. You Tube).

evan_s said:

There is an additional fee on top of the standard dvr fee for the MRV stuff and I believe it's still the same box so it only has a 160gb hd in the unit so you definitely want an external drive. Also I believe it's also limited to sharing to other non dvr boxes only and not between dvrs. It's definitely a slick piece of work tho.

Click to expand...

Yep, correct on all points. The MR feed is done via the Media Manger DVR. They have both an SD and an HD version. They charge you a couple extra bucks a month for the feature - and for the price, to me the SD version isn't worth it. The HD MR DVR is only $2 more per month over the SD version.

It is the same DVR physically as the stand-alone model - they turn on the multi-room feed via s/w. And yes they DESPERATELY need either a bigger harddrive, or external storage.

The other TVs HAVE to have the stand alone STBs on them. It won't work if you have a DVR on another TV, e.g. Also, because of the SD-only limitation on the feed currently, for the time being your other TVs HAVE to have the SD STB. Again, this doesn't work if your other TV has an HD box on it. But again, that's changing pretty soon.

There are other limitations:

1) You can't maintain recordings on the standard STBs - you can only do that from the DVR. So, I can watch stuff off my SD STB coming from the DVR, but I can't set up recordings, or delete any recordings from that TV. I have to go to the DVR to do that.

2) There's a latency when accessing the 'trick play' stuff from the SD STB. I press ffwd, and it takes a few seconds to respond. The reaon is that the feed gets routed through my computer router. All commands have to go from the SD STB -> router -> DVR, and the response has to follow the same path back.

Still, like you said - very slick. It works surprisingly well, and the PQ is excellent. And once my wife found out you can feed digital pictures to your TV with the DVR, she was sold. She LOVES that feature.