As Verizon declares its FiOS Quantum TV rollout complete, fellow Northern Virginian Ananth Sarathy shares his initial experience with the new whole-home DVR. He’s also kindly agreed to take questions in the comments — perhaps he’ll even be able to explain Verizon’s obtuse pricing.
I’ve had the new Quantum DVR for about a week now. The interface is the familiar FiOS interface that we’re used to, for better or worse. It doesn’t seem to have yet received the recent UI upgrade and is missing a few elements, such as the autotune to HD feature. The boxes do use the same FiOS remotes as before, so I’ve stuck with my existing ones, and didn’t need to program them, which is nice. But I kind of wish they had upgraded to a remote that could control AV system volume as well.
I completely set up the 6-tuner hub DVR first, including favorites and settings.The nice thing about doing it that was that it allowed me to import the settings from the head unit to the remote boxes. In fact each subsequent box can import from any of the boxes already setup. This was fortunate as there doesn’t seem to be an import or export settings on any of these boxes after initial setup, and it looks like you can only do an import on initial set up. So far, the remote extender boxes seem much more responsive than I had experienced with Verizon’s original Multi-Room DVR solution, and device reboots are much faster than they used to be with the older units. The remote boxes are very small with setup being pretty quick and easy – though I was unable to import my existing series and settings from our former DVR via the cloud.
One thing I noticed is that DVR actions on the remote boxes seem to be the same as if they were run on the head unit, so if I say skip the guide ahead two weeks on a remote box, my scheduled recordings are updated to end of the date on the viewed guide data. I haven’t used it that much, but it seems much better, and I look forward to its improvements and the Phase 2 rollout of expanded cloud functionality and viewing content on other devices.