Help, what remote do i need to change TV volume

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Help, what remote do i need to change TV volume

(17 posts)

grahamlthompson

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lightfast - 1 hour ago »
Thanks for the help, im in two minds to go for the genuine one or the harmony 350.
Leaning towards the 350, anyone used one with the humax and found it any good?

Logitech Harmony remotes use what is called an activity based approach which some like and others do not.

Suppose you have a 1000S connected to a AV amplifier which you normally use for the sound and a TV for the pictures.

When you setup the remote you tell it which items of kit you need for the activity.

In this case the 1000S, your AV amplifier and your TV. Pressing the activity button (say watch 1000S), switches them all on (there can be issues with kit that has no discrete on/off commands, only a power toggle. The remote can get out of synch).

Then you have to identify which inputs are to be selected on the TV and AV receiver and select the AV receiver to be used for volume and the TV for the video.

This sounds great in practice, but it can be a frustrating experience as when you end the activity it switches off all the kit in the activity (which may or may not be what you want to do).

The alternative is having to push a button to tell the box which item of kit you want to control.

The halfway house is a remote that has volume punch-through.

In that case the remote controls all the functions of the device it's set to work with except the volume which you call allocate to another device (eg your TV). I think Sky remotes use this approach.

| Fri 7 Aug 2015 18:02:00 #11 |
REPASSAC

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grahamlthompson - 16 minutes ago »

lightfast - 1 hour ago »
Thanks for the help, im in two minds to go for the genuine one or the harmony 350.
Leaning towards the 350, anyone used one with the humax and found it any good?

Logitech Harmony remotes use what is called an activity based approach which some like and others do not.
Suppose you have a 1000S connected to a AV amplifier which you normally use for the sound and a TV for the pictures.
When you setup the remote you tell it which items of kit you need for the activity.
In this case the 1000S, your AV amplifier and your TV. Pressing the activity button (say watch 1000S), switches them all on (there can be issues with kit that has no discrete on/off commands, only a power toggle. The remote can get out of synch).
Then you have to identify which inputs are to be selected on the TV and AV receiver and select the AV receiver to be used for volume and the TV for the video.
This sounds great in practice, but it can be a frustrating experience as when you end the activity it switches off all the kit in the activity (which may or may not be what you want to do).
The alternative is having to push a button to tell the box which item of kit you want to control.
The halfway house is a remote that has volume punch-through.
In that case the remote controls all the functions of the device it's set to work with except the volume which you call allocate to another device (eg your TV). I think Sky remotes use this approach.

Graham - could it be that Sky does not currently support AC3?

| Fri 7 Aug 2015 18:20:49 #12 |
gomezz

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grahamlthompson - 24 minutes ago »

This sounds great in practice, but it can be a frustrating experience as when you end the activity it switches off all the kit in the activity (which may or may not be what you want to do

You can set it to *not* turn off bits of kit which are not going to be used when you switch activity. For example, mine is set up to have total manual control of turning my PVRs on and off and I even have a dummy Device set up with the ON/OFF codes of all my PVRs.

My rule of thumb is to not turn off any PVR which will be used again within the hour to watch or record.

| Fri 7 Aug 2015 18:30:28 #13 |
lightfast

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Thanks gonna go for the harmony as I can integrate with kodi down the line

| Fri 7 Aug 2015 19:27:44 #14 |
grahamlthompson

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REPASSAC - 1 hour ago »

grahamlthompson - 16 minutes ago »

lightfast - 1 hour ago »
Thanks for the help, im in two minds to go for the genuine one or the harmony 350.
Leaning towards the 350, anyone used one with the humax and found it any good?

Logitech Harmony remotes use what is called an activity based approach which some like and others do not.
Suppose you have a 1000S connected to a AV amplifier which you normally use for the sound and a TV for the pictures.
When you setup the remote you tell it which items of kit you need for the activity.
In this case the 1000S, your AV amplifier and your TV. Pressing the activity button (say watch 1000S), switches them all on (there can be issues with kit that has no discrete on/off commands, only a power toggle. The remote can get out of synch).
Then you have to identify which inputs are to be selected on the TV and AV receiver and select the AV receiver to be used for volume and the TV for the video.
This sounds great in practice, but it can be a frustrating experience as when you end the activity it switches off all the kit in the activity (which may or may not be what you want to do).
The alternative is having to push a button to tell the box which item of kit you want to control.
The halfway house is a remote that has volume punch-through.
In that case the remote controls all the functions of the device it's set to work with except the volume which you call allocate to another device (eg your TV). I think Sky remotes use this approach.

Graham - could it be that Sky does not currently support AC3?

Sky has always supported ac3. It has supported ac3 5.1 over hdmi for a while. Previous to the firmware update that added 5.1 to hdmi out, you only got ac3 stereo (aka DD 2.0 over HDMI), you had to use the S/Pdif optical output (aka Toslink) to get 5.1 when available.

Incidentally the Premium Sky Movies SD (subscription only) had 5.1 surround.

However from reading other posts, it seems that even Sky-HD own channels using 5.1 lack the sort of dynamic range (sounds dull down to over compression), compared to the quality you get on say a top quality BBC-HD programme with 5.1.

Try the Last Night Of The Proms on a decent sound system

| Fri 7 Aug 2015 20:20:41 #15 |
lightfast

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Got the harmony 350 and love it, everything works perfectly fine with it and feels much nicer. I found the original remote very noisy when clicking buttons.

Just need to get a IR receiver for my firetv and should be all set sky free

| Sat 15 Aug 2015 16:46:06 #16 |
yakima

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lightfast - 1 week ago »
Think im going to try a logitech harmony, not sure which one but a cheapish one. Can the newer version of the standard remote change tv input and turn the tv off?
I will probably be swapping between my amazon firetv and the humax box quite a bit. My old sky remote was perfect in terms of functionality shame humax didnt quite do so well.

I am successfully using a Logitech Harmony One remote (although it is discontinued the replacement is the Touch but its not as reliable). You can still pick up a refurbished Harmony One for around £110.
You pre-program all your various inputs your devices are plugged into so when you choose an 'activity' like watching a dvd the remote switches the various devices on and off as required.
I have the Humax DTR-T1010, DVD player, Blu-ray player, av receiver and television all operating correctly through the One remote - i wouldn't be without it.
The only irksome thing is the Humax pvr all too frequently locks up the hdmi input to the tv on startup, so although you can hear the sound no picture is visible. This is a known phenomenon and I've yet to find the root cause after trying adjusting resolution down to 720p, swapping hdmi inputs, changing hdmi cable to adjusting power on delay timings. The only reliable solution is to power everything down and disconnect. This is a real pain but is the only way to return to normal working operations. Some kind of glitch with handshaking of the Humax and the rest of the system could be the problem but I don't know what else I can do.

| Mon 17 Aug 2015 7:43:32 #17 |