Addition by Subtraction

My new Harmony 670 remote arrived last night!

After a mere 3 hours of futzing I have it all set up and I must say it's awesome. No longer do I have to dig through a basket of 5 remotes to find the right one and hit many buttons just to watch tv. It's one button now. I set up 3 activities:

• Watch TV


• Watch a Movie


• Watch Apple TV

With the press of one of these buttons everything that is needed is automatically turned on and switched to the correct input. The beauty is everything is set up through an application on the computer (mac os x included) and you just enter all the devices you have (make and model #) and it does most of the work for you. There are a couple of fine tuning things to program in additional buttons and so forth but it has a learning mode which lets you do that very easily. Once you're done you just connect the remote to the usb port and click the update remote button and you're on your way to tv bliss.

The hardest part was getting the apple tv to cooperate. There aren't any included set ups for it so after googling for some info for awhile I found a way to do it. Basically the set up was similar to a digital music server and there's an entry for Apple in that list. After selecting that and renaming to Apple TV I had to customize the power/stand by feature which requires you to hold the play button down for 6 seconds to go to stand by. Fortunately again, there's a "learn raw commands" option that will learn how long a button needs to be pressed for. I also programmed in the up, down, left and right buttons on the remote for navigating through the apple tv screens. You also have to tell it to turn on your tv and what input it needs, as a digital music server doesn't typically need a tv.

I know that sounds pretty complicated but it's not that bad. And the end result is a thing of beauty. The basket of remotes is now hidden in a cabinet and in it's place is a single shiny remote. Now, the training of Cdubya begins... :)