JP1 Remotes

ok it's in the middle of summer , but it's also fathers day and i'm looking at differnt things for dad come december ...

here is what he is dealing with now ..

living room - tv , cable box , dvd player , vcr ( weening him off this ) , audio reciver .. all have their own remote .. i have a raido shack 15-2004 setup for him their.
basment - 60" lcd hdtv ( ya , you buy big toys when you retire ) , cable box , dvd , audio system - all with their own remotes - no universal setup yet.

i was thinking about grabing the master mx-500 for him this year and basicly putting everything on the one remote .. looks like 8 devices ... shouldnt be hard to get on the one remote ...
now does this seem like a good idea? are their better soultions out their, i know "looking" at an lcd all the time would cause him to never use a soft button remote .. he's the type that needs to "feel" it , and the idea of carying around 1 remote that does everything would thrill him.

How are your JP1 programming skills? While the MX-500 is a nice remote, it's kinda big 'n' bulky. Obviously I'm biased, but I think a well programmed JP1 remote outshines all the competition.

I think that if you were to get a couple of the best JP1 remote that you can find and then do all the programming for him so it's really easy to run his system, I think that would be the perfect present. The remotes themselves wouldn't cost that much, but the programming would be priceless.

well like i said he is using the 15-2004 right now for the living room , and i don't mind spending the time to program it all for him ... but i still need to buy a new remote as he is looking at 8 devices at least ...

one weirdness i did find ... the comcast ( Motorola ) HD-PVR box in the basement seems to use smilier protocol and signal for the up down arrows as the vol on the Toshiba speaker system ... it plays havoc on the sound when he goes to move around in the guide section .. i need to capture the signals for both remotes and compare them and see if their is a work around for it.

lucindrea wrote:well like i said he is using the 15-2004 right now for the living room , and i don't mind spending the time to program it all for him ... but i still need to buy a new remote as he is looking at 8 devices at least

You can easily support 8 devices in the 2104 using the extender. More than 8 is possible if you get fancy in programming.

I use 15-2104's in two different rooms and mostly keep each remote in the room where it's used. But I have them all programmed identically (to each support everything).

In past versions, I used shifted device buttons to get over six devices. For two rooms, with five or fewer devices in each room, I found it easiest to:

1) Dedicate a device button to each TV (one per room)
2) Dedicate a device button to the VCR model that I have two identical (one in each room).
3) For the other three device buttons, I made the meaning depend on which TV button was used last (even it that was long earlier).

On rare occasions (and right after reprogramming a remote) I need to use a TV button as a prefix for selecting another device (which is no worse than shifting was). But device selection is mostly single press.

If you want a remote with 8 regular device buttons, you can go too far wrong with a URC-8811.