Remote Controls

Thinking of trying this remote, Sony RMAV2500. Almost half the price.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...t&productCategoryId=cat08065&id=1076629005762

 

i just orered the 680 from new egg. i'd been waiting for 880, but i don't like certain aspects of its styling and it still seems pretty scarce.

 

picked up this remote yesterday. Got it home and got all my devices programmed in. Didnt really have time to mess with it too much since I had to go out. Got home, started messing with it and realized the backlight doesnt work. Have to return it today. Found the sony rm-av3100 for $99 at jandr.com. If BB doesnt price match, I'll get my $ back and order from there.

 

got my 680. after wrestling the batteries into the thing, i began the task of setting it up.

first impressions -- they need to know more about my equipment. my tv has 5 inputs, but they only have 4 (i had to add the 5th). too many questions about how the devices work -- don't they know?

setting up the tivo remote was very worrisome cuz it asked me to hit the power button on the remote. wtf? there is no power button. i finally escaped that mess and i'm honestly not sure how it decided to set it up. tivo viewing seems to work, tho, so whatever.

actually, one thing that's annoying. it presumes i care which tuner i was tivo on. i don't. i can't seem to tell it not to worry about it. maybe i can delete a tuner input... hmmm...

it does seem to let you over-ride a lot of stuff tho, so i'm sure i can get everything to work fine.

it seems like it should default to the poweron and poweroff signals if available instead of toggles. i'll see if it does. i can already forsee inserting a dvd before i've told it i want to watch the dvd (and thus confuse it by powering on the dvd).

also, i have to reprogram my dvd's cd track skipping cuz it is simply not working at all. play/pause/stop/eject work. but no shuttling...

it also asked me about my favorite channels. not sure why. maybe it wants to d/l some programming info or something, but that seems redundant with directv... maybe there's more to it?

 

okay, most everything works now. 'cept i can't get sort out some audio selections...

when i go to dvd, i need to turn on "multi-in" on my receiver. but i can't figure out how to turn it off only when it's on (it's a toggle so i can't just assume it's on).

hmm....

they need a way to add custom mode tracking for devices.

receiver -> add new mode "multi-in"
"on" - command
"off" - command

watch tv -> additional device mode
"receiver" "multi-in"
[.] - "on"
[.] - "off"
[.] - "don't care"

something like that...

 

If the device doesn't support discrete commands, you run into this problem. For instance, the older panasonic plasmas didn't have discrete input selection, so you'd have to toggle input select 3 times to get a particular input. Of course, that breaks if you have changed the input manually or something. Modern panasonics, fyi, have discrete everything .

So, in short, you can likely blame your receiver, as NO remote will be able to fix that problem... You can easily add a "multi-in" selection button to your "Watch DVD" and "Watch TV" activities so you can manually control it in case the activity toggle is off...

 

well, looks like they have a work around. i can issue a specific command when entering and exiting an activity. in this case, it's "inputMulti" toggle. assuming it doesn't go out of sync, it should work reasonably well.

my tv does that same input selection thing. i'm gonna see if there's some direct input selection. tivo's also don't turn off, they just go into standby mode which isn't a single action for some insane reason -- you have to go to the tivo menu, then select "standby" from the list. the list sometimes has more items when they're advertising certain things, so that's even stupider considering the "standby" mode is at the bottom of the list. luckily, page down goes to the bottom automatically. but the tivo button is modal itself and won't always get you to the tivo menu (like if i'm already on the tivo menu).

 

now i think i've totally lost my mind. i could swear the "live tv" button on the tivo remote would toggle between the two inputs and now it just brings up guide. wtf? i thought i had misprogrammed something on the 680 but my tivo remote does it, too. did they just upgrade the firmware or something? what gives?

 

Pressing down on the direction pad switches tuners. I thought LiveTV did at one point too, but I never use that.

Yeah, you can add whatever commands you want, it's very flexible, but it's inevitable that it will get out of synch with that sound stuff. I just create a custom menu for each activity, putting simple TV Power toggle on each action (in case I want to pause it but not have the bright screen on), setting the aspect ratio on the TV, doing TiVo thumbs up/thumbs down stuff, etc. Works great, and I NEVER have to dig into the device menu.

Oh, and I have NEVER put my TiVo into Standby...don't see any reason to do so, and I've had one since the beginning...

 

these remotes are killing my brain...whats left of it