Remote control consolidation??? (Roku, TV, Soundbar, etc...)

Chad Beattie

Experienced
Our main TV room has 5 remotes (Apple TV, Roku, TV, Cable Box, and Sound Bar). Other rooms have at least two or three remotes also. Anyone had any experience with consolidating these into one and what has worked well?

Thanks
 
Looks like the logitech, logitech or the logitech lol.

I've had a bunch of them over the years. I still use one in my home theater area to control my screen dropping down, turn on all the stuff etc. It works 90% of the time, cant figure out how to send 2 presses to turn off my projector. I haven't messed with it out of frustration with their app and upgrading process. It might have got better in recent times though, as my remote is probably getting long in the tooth.
 
Our main TV room has 5 remotes (Apple TV, Roku, TV, Cable Box, and Sound Bar). Other rooms have at least two or three remotes also. Anyone had any experience with consolidating these into one and what has worked well?

I use the Logitech Harmony (the version with the hub). Works great when you've got a bunch of different devices with complicated requirements like switching input to different sources depending on what kind of activity you're turning on, or timing issues, or sequencing issues. Harmony has been doing this for a long time, and because it's a difficult problem to solve, there really isn't any competition.
 
I used the Logitech Harmony Ultimate for quite a few years and it generally worked well. I went the other way and consolidated on Apple TV and now use Apple TV apps for everything instead.
 
Thanks. Have you used any of these?
Yup. They all work semi-okay. Touch screens are stupid and eat batteries. Got rid of my older, touchscreen Logitech. I also inherited a Universal Remote setup in the house we bought and it was awful. Swapped it out for Logitech. Works great. And I can change things without having to "contact my Universal Remote dealer".

Most of this has all become a non-issue since Roku was integrated into the main TV we use and the main TV will automatically turn on the receiver and put it on the correct input. That solved like 99.999% of the problems the rest of the family had operating the setup. The TCL TV is the input switcher now and everyone knows how to use it to get to the different devices which have proper, labeled names on the screen like "Xbox" and "AppleTV".

The one place were I use that Logitech remote is about to get cleaned up and the old receiver there is being replaced with a cheap'ish soundbar and satellite sub-woofer setup because I can't be arsed to deal a complicated setup in that spot -- we don't use it enough for TV watching and I mainly just want it to play some background music.
 
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I have one of the Harmony remotes. I bought it when the POS remote to my POS Vizio TV quit working. It does work with the TV, Roku, and switching to my HTPC. I even had FLIRC on the HTPC which it sort of controlled.

It's fine if you play by the rules. Only turn on/off the set with the remote. If I turn it off manually, as I'm walking out the door for example, the remote is really confused, and it takes a long time to get back in sync. It doesn't help that the above POS Vizio takes like a minute to come up, probably because of the "smart" TV crap that I wish wasn't even there.
 
I just had a new TV, soundbar installed and they set up a Harmony Elite to control them along with my Uverse box and Xbox.
Works pretty good but I experience a few glitches most times. (Everything turns on except TV, for example). I'm trying to set it up so Alexa can control the channels, etc.
 
I've had the Harmony Elite for a few years now. Controls TV, BluRay, Xbox, receiver, lights. Aside from the occasional hiccup, it's been great.
 
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