[mythtv-users] LCD HDTV recommendations (that are Myth friendly)...

[Chad]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 9:29 AM, Brad DerManouelian
<myth at dermanouelian.com> wrote:

>  Try picking up a Harmony remote. You can get the 550's pretty cheap
>  now and it will allow you to press a single button to get your TV in
>  the right state for whichever activity you're switching to. I have an
>  880 and I really love hitting a single button for each activity like
>  "Watch Recordings" and "Listen to Vinyl". It turns on the right stuff,
>  turns off the right stuff, sets the input on each device
>  appropriately, etc. It even works on TV's that require cycling through
>  an Input command to get to the right input.
>
>  -Brad

I realize I'm in the minority on this list for disliking the harmony
**with** Myth, and I accept all counter-arguments as correct and true
for **your** situation, however...

I absolutely cannot stand the lack of usefulness my Harmony has
brought me.  Previously I used an RCA-RCU810 remote (I think it's
about a 10-year old remote now) that had significantly more
functionality related to Myth than my harmony-659 offers.  Up front
I'll mention that all of the activity features are worthless to me in
general since my receiver takes care of most of those things for me.
I never used it, but the RCU-810 had macros that basically did the
same thing as the harmony "activities", but I didn't have to be a 2nd
grader to make it work (and by that I mean the harmony software really
bothers me because it doesn't let me do what I want directly, it
instead expects what I want to do and gives me only a small portion of
options at a time for configuration choices; JUST LET ME DO IT... :D
).  With my previous remote to setup macros I would select the device,
choose the function and move on to the next device.  Then using the
macro keys I could perform "activities".  Worthless really on any
remote, and if everything doesn't work out perfectly then you either
hit "help" and hope it figures it out, or you have to grab other
remotes to get the remaining devices working properly.

I've got hours and hours of rants on why I hate my harmony experience
**in my theater room with MythTV**.  On the flip side, without MythTV
and having more than 3 devices to turn on/off or even if one of your
devices (like my receiver) needs to be setup in some special way, then
I can by all means see a high value in activity-based remote
controlling.  In addition to this, I imagine if I spent enough time
and possibly got one of the higher end Harmony remotes I would have a
better experience; but as is, with my SST-659 I would rather have a
basic, non-macro remote like the Philips PMDVD6T that I have switched
to whenever my Harmony pisses me off enough.

:)

-Chad