Anyone Have A Multi-Room DVR?
 

I am interested in the so-called multi-room DVRs, that let you watch recorded programs on any TV in the house, not just the TV in the same room as the DVR.

Does anyone have this? I think you can get it with Verizon FiOS, not sure if anyone else offers it.

Any positive or negative experiences?

I had one when I had Dish Network. I had a single DVR/tuner in the family room and was able to watch DVR'd shows from the bedroom. It was limited to 2 different (unique) outputs. The only down side was if I was recording 2 shows at once, I couldn't watch another station. However, I could still watch any of my previously DVR'd shows.

Tivo HD is multi room as long as you have a dvr hooked up to each tv.

From each dvr you can see the other dvr's and can transfer the recordings to watch them. You have to let it transfer the show, it will not stream from another box.

I have 2 Tivo HD's getting signal from on OTA antenna and connected wirelessly to my computer and each other. I have installed 3rd party freeware that allows my Tivo's to read from a video file on my computer and play just about any format of downloaded shows, movies, etc. that you can find. These videos are streamed and do not require any transferring, so basically my Tivo's play off the hard drives in my system rather than the drives installed in the box.

At&t uverse offers the multi room dvr. It was not available when we signed up a year ago, but was upgraded about 6 months ago.

Unfortunately from what I have read, you can only get 2 HD streams into your house at the same time on Uverse. So if you have multiple TVs on at the same time, you'll tap out the signal.

How long do you have to wait for a program to transfer from TiVo 1 to TiVo 2 so you can watch it on the tv connected to TiVo 2? Let's say a 1 hour basic quality program.

We have a Dishnetwork box that does this, though we don't have it set up this way. It has two tuners. So we can watch one thing and record another. Or record two shows while watching a recorded show. You can change the mode and have one of the tuners transmit its signal via RF to another room.

You do not have to wait for the transfer to finish to start watching.

Shows recorded in SD can be viewed immediately while transferring between dvr's.

Since the HD shows are so large, I usually give them a 5-10 minute headstart so I don't 'catch-up' while viewing.

I need to look into live streaming from box to box. Tivo has portions of their code opened up to the tivo community so the people in the know can write their own software and share it with others.

As well you want to wait 5-10 minutes to start watching as this gives you time to fast forward through all of the frigging commercials.

Cablevision will test a so called remote server DVR which stores the programs on the cable operators' network, not on hard drives in the customers' home. This would allow recorded programs to be watched on any TV. It would also, if the cable operator wanted, allow other "features" like preventing fast forwarding through commercials . . . Fortunately Comcast has no (disclosed) plans to try the same.

Yes, AT&T's U-Verse already has this - Whole Home DVR. One DVR, watch recordings from any TV. Also, AT&T is beginng to roll out an update that also allows the TVs not connected to the DVR to delete and schedule the recordings as well.

I need to check on the HD streams. I thought it was up to 4 now.

I'm pretty sold on Tivo so may try to get the multiple TiVo/transfer thing going. It would be nice if can network them over the coaxial cable rather than doing it over wireless. It's almost time for a new TiVo anyway, ours must be 6 years old.

Regular Tivos can do this as well - I have two non-HD tivos and I can transfer between them just fine. It is however not very fast. The older Tivos have USB 1.1 so it doesn't matter what sort of network card you put in (wireless or wired - 54mb 802.11g or fast ethernet 100/mb) USB 1.1 is 11mb/s max.

2.0 is something like 400mb/s - maybe the newer HD models have that.

Still I could transfer a 30 minute show in less than 10 minutes I think. Also note that on the non-HD Tivo of course the files sizes will be smaller since they aren't HD file sizes.

I don't think you can network them over the coax - that would be going back in time technically =-).

Wireless is okay, wired is better. I wired my house up with ethernet in part to get my tivos off of wireless so I could do transfers better - when it WASN'T better I thought about it and realized my limitation was the USB 1.1 deal.