Home Theater Installation - Choosing the Right Remote
Hi, it’s Keith Harman, with Smart Wired Home, and we’re back with how to select and install a home theater. Next on the docket, we’re gonna talk about remote controls. Now I know a lot of you think that the most important decision you’re gonna make is which TV you’re gonna get. But, we would argue at Smart Wired Home that the most important decision you’re gonna make is what remote are you going to use. Reason is because that remote is what’s gonna make everything work together. It’s the one to allow you to use it, and as well as everybody in the family, the mom, dad, grandparents, kids, everybody should be able to operate the system, of course subject to your parental controls on your cable box. So, typically when you end up putting in a home theater, you're gonna end up with at least four remotes. Here is four typical remotes as we would see, one for your TV, one for your cable box, one for your audio/video receiver, and one for your DVD player. So, what’s, you know, you have these four remotes, so what is your solution? A lot of you have this solution, which is, you get a nice little basket to put them all in, so that you can find them all. Thinking that maybe we can come up with a little higher tech solution than that, so if we have four remotes, here’s what we have to do to turn on the system, to say, watch television. First of all we turn on the TV, we set that to the right input for the cable box, so that we can see what’s on the cable box. Then we turn on the cable box, we would then set that to the channel that we wanna watch. Then we turn on the AV receiver, and set that get the sound from the cable box. Now, you, now you’re ready to start doing, start actually watching TV and changing the channels here on this remote. We would then, you know, instead of the cable box, we would then substitute the DVD remote, if we wanted to watch a DVD, do some things on there. So if we wanna move to doing a more programmable universal remote, a lot of people look at universal remotes, okay, I can program the buttons to do things. So, now I take this remote and I turn on the, turn on the TV, set the channel, turn on the cable box, set the channel, turn on the AV receiver, set the input. So, I’m still doing the whole bunch of different things and I have to remember which one of those things to do, a whole bunch of different button presses. So what we would look at today with something called an activity based remote. So instead of pressing buttons to do specific things, we do something called macro. Macro is just a fancy name for stringing a bunch of button presses together. So we take something like this remote from Harmony, it’s made by Logitech. And what we see are different, different activities across the top, watching movie, watch TV, listen to music, so when, when one of those buttons is pressed, all those commands would then come out of the end of the remote and send it by infrared signals, so that’s line of sight, it’s gonna come out of here and point towards the equipment and set all the inputs to the right thing. Great thing from ease of use perspective, the one thing you always keep in mind when you’re talking about infrared, this is light coming out of the end of this, so, if you press the button, put it down, put it away, turn to talk somebody, anything else, point it behind you, all kinds of different ways that you can send, you know, it’s sending 6 commands out there, but because you, you point it away for a minute, it only got half of them, three of, three commands let’s say. Nice capability to address that was the help button which will actually start asking you about what’s on or what’s off. But that’s just one of the inherent limitations of the infrared technology. So if you wanted then to move up from this, this, by the way, this remote is available for retail price of around 150 dollars and it is something that end user can program, it’s not like that you need a huge amount of specialty skills to be able to do it, it’s reasonable to expect that a home owner could, could program this remote. Moving up, we start to address that capability of not being able to see things. So, we talked about moving from infrared technology, which is, light based, to radio frequency technology, so like a radio. So it doesn’t matter where you point it or what you do, put it behind your back or anything else, the commands still get through, as long as you’re not too far away for the radio to reach. This one actually has a little bit more controls here in which where it’s actually programmable buttons here. So, that we see, we watch TV, watch DVD, and you can actually rename those in the set up software. That’s is, what is important, both of these remote are set up with software on your PC, you plug a USB cable into it and then update the remote. So, you’re not trying to program it through this interface to hit this button, put that button, whatever, you actually get a full user interface on the computer where it’s a lot more user friendly to be able to use in programming. So, the radio frequency technology solves the problem of, most of the time, of getting only half of the commands, because you didn’t point it. But also it gives you the capability to take your devices and put them in a closet or hide them away, put them in a cabinet that you can't see through, because you don’t have to have that line of sight to be able to have the controls come through. Now, if you really want to get into more advance controls, you know, then we get into something that probably can't be done, can't be programmed by a, by the average home owner. We start to get into something that will control your lights, control your HVAC, control the, to be able to view video cameras through your remote, to be able to turn other devices on and on, on and off. All kinds of different capabilities for total home control as you get from something like this, so we’ve covered the remotes from the very, the basic multiple remotes that we wanted to get rid off to the middlety remotes to the high end remotes. Basically, what you need to think about the level of ease of use and capabilities that you’re looking for and therefore you can make your decision on what it is that you’d want and eliminating the basket and the case.