6 things to love about the Verizon FiOS DVR
I’m sure you’ve heard the accolades for Verizon FiOS TV’s picture quality. All well deserved. Bravo.
What you might not be aware of, though, is the quality of their DVR. Here are some features you’ll love:
- When recording one show while watching another, and you attempt to fast forward through the show you’re watching, you have a good chance of seeing the DVR re-boot itself. The real benefit here is that you don’t have to worry about the show you were recording taking up all the disk space it would have taken up if it… well… finished recording.
- There must be some secret magical code built into the data stream that signifies the start and end of commercials. When watching a recorded show, and the show returns from commercial, about half the time the screen will go all pixelized for 3 or 4 seconds and the sound will drop out for about 10 to 15 seconds. This is a great feature, because you’re not bothered with having to listen to the resolution to the cliff-hanger that lead into the commercial. Thank you, secret magical code!
- The FiOS DVR is a wizard when it comes to disk space management. Just check out the picture below. I was so happy with this feature that I asked them to send me another unit. But don’t worry, it did the same thing!
- One surprisingly pleasant feature is that you can’t fast forward in approximately the last two minutes of a recording. This is so nice when there’s a little tid-bit, like the tail segment of a show, that you’re trying to locate quickly.
- Verizon has built closed captioning into the DVR, and it’s a gem! Sure, there’s plenty of gibberish and scores of unreadable characters; that’s par for the course these days. Where Verizon stomps the competition is in timing. In many shows, entire sentences are only displayed for a fraction of a second. Verizon has really hit the nail on the head with this feature, because, hey, who reads these days anyway?
- One feature they’ve cleverly left out is the ability to skip through large chunks of a show. So if you’ve recorded a 4 hour football game and want to quickly skip to the middle or near the end, all you have to do is fast forward. At top speed, it only takes many, many, minutes.
fuzzy math