Stephen Fry rants about universal remote controls.
Those things have always struck me as being a bit like Esperanto, really: universally pointless. The concept seems good enough, but when it comes to implementing it, well....
You'd think a multi-function remote with soft controls implemented using a touchscreen ought to be useful, though expensive. (Isn't there a Palm app for this?) Apparently, though, they're not. Useful, that is. Expensive, they are.
But, then: a lot of the non-universal remotes provided with appliances are hard to use... because they try to be more than one thing.
I have (pops off to living room for a moment) five remotes, plus the cordless keyboard/trackball. They are:
- Projector: 22 buttons, of which I routinely use ON/OFF; the three input-select buttons see occasional use, and the rest are for setup and maintenance. This one is pretty well designed, just for the projector.
- Receiver: 51 buttons, of which I routinely use four. Three others get occasional use. Six of the buttons select which device it's controlling... which might be handy if I had a bunch of gadgets all made by Onkyo, which I don't (just this receiver and my old one from college, which has no remote-control capability whatsoever). Were I to venture beyond the few buttons I actually use, this remote would become horribly confusing.
- VCR: 24 buttons, reasonably well set up for controlling a VCR... though it also has modes for controlling a TV set, a cable box, and something or other else. As a control for those other things, I expect it would be a horrible mismatch.
- DVD player: 33 buttons, 17 of which have more or less obvious uses. Only controls the DVD player.
- Computer: this is one of the ATI RF remotes, and I've set Xine up to understand it reasonably well. 52 buttons, not well suited to any particular real-world usage, but I've mapped about 20 of them to useful functions.
It would kinda-sorta make sense to have a single remote to handle the "usual" functions for the projector, receiver, and computer. (Actually, if I added an IRDA transceiver to the computer, this could be a use for an old Palmoid device... I think there's a Grand Vizier still in working order around here. If I learned to write little Palm apps, it could be a nice refinement to the home theater. Also, it could, when talking to the computer, receive context menus over the IRDA... assuming I wrote context menu software for Linux. Which I'm not likely to do. So much for that idea.)
Anyway, what I was about to write, before I started counting remotes and buttons, is this: the remotes which come with appliances are often confusing in their own right. I sometimes find myself trying to explain, to one older person or another, how to turn the TV on.
Now, you might think that turning the TV on would be simple. But, when you look at the typical basic home TV setup these days, you have four components: the TV, the VCR, the DVD player, and the cable or satellite box.
Each of these components comes with a remote.
Each of these remotes has features for controlling the other three components. Only those features don't work, because they're not all the same brand, nor the same vintage.
So the first order of business is to determine, and explain, which remote controls which device. In so doing, it is not helpful that, for example, the DVD-player remote has a button which purports to turn the TV on and off.
The next thing to explain is that pressing certain buttons on any of these remotes will cause it to cease controlling the device with which it arrived, and instead attempt to control some other device which you don't have. You may find the remote for your Zenith TV set is sending messages to someone else's Zenith DVD player, while your Panasonic DVD player ignores it. This necessitates a recovery plan: if it stops working, push this button to make it start controlling the TV again.
Then there's the whole business of finding the input-select button on the TV remote, figuring out how it works on that model, and explaining how to use it. It doesn't help that the VCR and cable box have their own input-select functions, which generally don't do what you want, and are labeled based on a topology that doesn't match anyone's actual installation. (Yeah, of course you route the video from the DVD player through the VCR. It's the obvious thing to do, when the VCR was there first. Then you learn about Macrovision.)
So, yeah, remotes are a serious aggravation... but the universal ones are neither the solution nor the problem.
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