I'm considering picking up a Harmony One remote some time in the near future.

My audio receiver has some funky routing and connections such that it needs to be in "DVD" mode in order to use the satellite receiver, in "VCR/PVR" mode in order to use the Playstation, and in "TV" mode in order to use the Xbox, et cetera.

In other words, there isn't necessarily a 1:1 correspondence between the video input selection and the audio input selection.

Is the remote programmable enough to gracefully handle this kind of situation?

Every Harmony model will be able to do what you're looking for. There's no hard-set 1:1 relationship between video and audio source selections as far as the remote configuration goes.

The "One" is by far the best looking remote they have ever produced (even if they stole my product name - Iong story). I'm not sure about its plastics because I haven't held one yet, but it's by far the best/logical layout, especially compared to many of the crappier ones they've produced, including the 880 which I have.

Yes, I'd expect it to work just fine. You define an activity, then what state each component should be in, then what codes physical buttons send, then what other functions you want available on the LCD. From what I hear, support is responsive if you need help customizing something, but I've never had to.

Thanks guys. Looking forward to trying it out.

Before throwing-down on the Harmony, be aware of the AR Xsight remotes that are coming out soon. They have the ability to work with the RF receiver in your HR20.

If the reviews are good, I plan to replace my Harmony 880 with one. I think the 880 is pretty poorly designed as Bruno mentioned. The keys are too hard and easily pressed by accident. I like my Harmony 720 with rubber keys a lot better, but I'm waiting to see what AR comes up with.

If you want to try one at low-risk, then Costco often carries some Harmony remotes, and they still have the no-questions-asked return policy.

Cheers

Hm. I like how the AR Xsight remote has those four colored buttons that correspond to the four colored buttons on the DirecTV remote.

How does the Harmony One handle those four colored buttons?

I can't speak for the Harmony One, but on my 880 and 720, I have the colored buttons mapped to the soft keys on the LCD. However, a friend of mine has a Harmony 5XX variant that has real colored buttons.

The Harmony One uses the touch display to generate those, when the particular device needs them. At present they display as a std blue rectangle with white text. Not as a colored rectangle.

Many remotes have a lot more functions than the H1 has hard keys for. All other functions wind up on the touch screen. Six at a time, so there can be a lot of paging to get to a specific function.

The buttons on the H1 are mostly equal to those found on a Tivo peanut, just not as well laid out.

Ergonomically it needs some work. Too many of the buttons are crowded too near the bottom. It's difficult to one hand it, and press the numbers, enter and clear buttons.

Programming it is pretty easy, You ID all the devices you have, then define activities (watch tivo)(watch bluray). That is all done on-line via a client. The results are transferred to the remote via usb.

The net result is that when an activity is selected (watch tivo) the right stuff turns on, inputs are chosen... then all the remotes buttons are programmed in a mix and match mode. Some control the tivo, others the tv, or home theater rcvr...

At anytime you can set the remote to a particular device, which again resets how all the buttons and touch screen are defined, devoting them all to the particular device.

The one area I'm vexed by is the narrow field of emission of the ir sender. It's only a problem with my plasma tv. My Tivo peanut has no problem with off axis activation of tv functions. The H1 has to be pointed directly at the tv's IR port.

Some activities, require 5-6 seconds of stability while the macros unwind. If a deflection causes a device to miss a pulse, things don't work as expected. I can deal with that. My parents can NOT.

To be sure this is the best of all universal remotes I've used. With the exception of the narrow field of emission.

I got the 890, and I have to say I love it. I've never noticed the issue with the narrow IR beam, as all my devices have an IR transmitter stuck to the front of them. I just hit a button, set the remote down and it just works. The only issue I have is that when I lose power, it has no idea where things are. Not a fault of the remote, but a fault of some of my equipment not having discreet codes. My only real gripe is that I can't map the huge power button on top to turn off all my equipment and then back on again.

That RF remote would help my biggest problem. Having parts of the system go out of sync because one component missed it's cue.

Though I have been toying with the idea of adding one of the ir blasters meant for closed cabinets.

I have an 880, but ergonomics are my biggest problem with it. The buttons just seemed positioned 'wrong'. Often used buttons (fast forward and rewind) are positioned right above the 'skip to the end' type buttons. That took a while to get use to.

Programming it is stupidly easy. They have a lot of components predefined, so you just pick what you have. After that, you tell it which components are on which settings for each activity. All that is guided for you, like it will ask what input on the TV and output on the receiver is required, or if you want to control the volume with the receiver or the TV. It is really easy.

The very existence of such products is evidence that the consumer electronics industry is a bag of fail.

Imagine if your PC needed different keyboards for running Word, Excel, Firefox, and Powerpoint. And third-party companies made good money selling "universal keyboards" where "all" you have to do is tell it what versions of Word, Excel, Firefox, and Powerpoint you use, and it can then operate each of them in a unified but relatively clunky way. You'd correctly conclude that the entire Windows software industry was smoking crack, that they were all muppets, that they were out of their frickin' trees.

Yet for some reason, while we wouldn't put up with that sort of misdesigned piffle complicating our working lives, we accept it in our living room getting in-between us and our entertainment. Why?

Peter

Different remotes and different remote protocols isn't the problem with consumer electronics. The lack of an additional standardized communication protocol is what's missing. Something that would let the components communicate with each other wired or wirelessly. A number of efforts have come and gone of the years and a few are still around, though with no signs of gaining significant traction.

The computer software analogy isn't the most appropriate one because the interaction involves a manual targeting operation - choosing which application will be in focus to receive commands. One of the main goals of a good universal remote is removing the manual targeting/selection of components and that's where one of the biggest challenges comes in this product segment.

Yes, exactly.

Agreed. And what I'm saying is, the reason it's challenging is because it fundamentally shouldn't be the remote's (unaided) job. All the functionality we're talking about here -- tuners, PVR, TVs, CD, DVD, preamp, streaming -- already needs to incorporate targetting/selection UI, even if it's only a CD player targetting what track to play next. What's really needed is for the gizmos in your entertainment system to collectively swallow some humility, step up to the plate, and say, you haven't got a balkanised and emulous pile of "components" here, you've got a system that's got various inputs (CD, tuners, streaming), various processing (PVR, gaming), and non-various outputs (one big screen, which should be optional for audio-only usage, plus one pair or sextet of speakers), and which can assimilate all these various peripherals and present a coherent way of controlling all of them.

Peter

Agreed. It's a true shame.

Well, I got it. Spent some time today programming it. It's nifty, but boy oh boy is that PC software just awful.

It does all the things I want it to do, but makes me answer a ton of radio button questions to get there. You can't even rename an activity without a dozen clicks. When creating a new activity, it has to have some boilerplate name, you have to fully complete the activity, then go back in later and rename it. I mean, just terrible, terrible UI design.

At least it *is* programmable and appears to do all the stuff I want it to do. Still not sure if it's going to be able to control my Rio/Dell Receiver or not, it didn't seem to like the product name...

And one other thing: Why does it make you take it OUT of the charging cradle in order to plug in the USB cable to program it? Why not make the USB cable connect to the cradle, like every other device that uses a cradle? Strange.

It's still pretty nifty, but I have yet to really put it through its paces. More later.

Oh, and:



In my case, they're actually little graphic pictures of the colored buttons, quite nice, they match what the TV screen would say to press.

I don't like defending the Harmony (I dislike it for the reasons you were just complaining about and more), but I don't think that's strange at all. Quite the opposite. Most people will want to take the remote into another room to their computer to program it. Besides, after you set the thing up, how often are you going to need that USB port? I haven't programmed my remote in almost 2 years.

Good point, the USB plug is rarely used.

In other news, I found out what the correct device name is for the Rio Receiver and/or the Dell Digital Audio Receiver. You have to put in "Dell Rio Receiver" and then it finds it. Other combinations of those names fail to find the right IR profile.

I ran across that with the model number of my plasma. I've forgotten now but it was a problem with spaces or dashes or some such. The software doesn't give any close matches, or allow partial searches.

It *tries* to give you close matches, but then fails utterly. I tried:

Dell Digital Audio Receiver (it gave me a match of "Dell Digital")

Rio Receiver (it gave me "Rio Carbon" among other Rio portable players)

I tried several other variants, and I don't remember which variant gave me "Dell Rio Receiver", but I'm glad I stumbled across it.

In other news: In actual usage, it kicks a lot of ass.

In other news that I forgot to mention: The Windows software setup sucks ass. If you have a nonstandard TMP and TEMP environment variable, as I did, the setup program freezes hard. Took a lot of googling to find out the solution to that one.

Okay, here's a fun one. I'll crosspost this to the Harmony forums.

My TV sometimes misses inputs when I switch activities. Increasing the time delays on the input-switcher doesn't help because it needs a delay in a different place that the remote isn't compensating for. Here's the problem:

If the TV switches inputs,
or
If the device connected to the current input powers down,
then
The TV sits there with a box saying "Input: YPbPr2" for a moment and refuses to respond to any more keystrokes.

The problem is that the Harmony is compensating for the former, but not the latter. For example, if I'm watching the DVR and I want to switch to the VCR on a different input (or vice versa), it powers down the DVR, hence the TV sits there saying "Input: YPbPr2", refusing to respond for a moment, but the Harmony merrily tries to switch inputs on the TV *right away* without waiting for the pause *at all*. So it never switches inputs. In this situation, the Harmony completely ignores any time delays I've told it that the TV needs in order to switch inputs.

I see the following possibilities:

1. I need to tell it to leave on the DVR, VCR, or whatnot, rather than turning it off. *I CANNOT DO THIS* because of the way my audio amplifier works. If I leave the DVR on, then it will always force itself to the DVR's coaxial digital audio.

2. I need to re-order how the Harmony handles the order of: Power old stuff down, switch inputs on the TV, power new stuff on. I need to change it to: Switch TV's inputs FIRST, then power old stuff down, then power new stuff on. How do I change this ordering?

3. Maybe there could be a software fix where the remote could be smart enough to consider a "power down a device" to be a situation that might induce the need for a delay on the TV inputs, and implement it correctly. Wonder if they could do that.

Anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

There are several places in the software where you can change the delays. Knowing which is the trick. Choosing the wrong type can fix the problem but cause delays where not needed.

Having a device miss an input, is a the biggest impediment for these babies.

That's the problem. There is no delay at all in the place I'm saying. I've gone to the screen where you adjust the delay times, and none of those delays are getting played at this spot.

From your description, I don't believe you can make any adjustments through the normal interface to overcome the error being presented on your TV. The delays set in the Harmony config aren't realy intended to overcome this specific scenario.

I think your best bet is to contact their customer service to see if they can hook you up with some custom profile changes.

This is precisely why I'm looking to upgrade to an HDMI upconverting receiver. TV manufacturers don't seem to realize that people are going to want to change inputs. Mine takes about 4 seconds to successfully change inputs, and of course only cycles through them.

They can do that?

I'm not sure if they can figure out and correct for the exact circumstances you're seeing, but they can do a lot of stuff on the back end that's simply not possible through the end-user software.

The folks on the Harmony forum had the same advice. I'll give it a shot.