The landscape has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. A typical system had a stack of components, including VCR, DVD, CD player, cable box, along with the usual A/V receiver, and a television. An RF remote was a must to work a system behind closed doors or down the hall somewhere.

A key component changed for the worse when cable boxes became networked, and suddenly did not respond quickly, like they always had, to button pushes. Then, over the course of the past several years, people have ditched their disc players, and except for an occasional Roku or Apple TV, the cable box seems to be the only component that needs control.

Now the voice remote out in Comcast land is generally a favorite with most customers. I use URC, but not their total control stuff, so I am thinking the days of RF remotes may be passing.

Most people with an RF remote also keep their Comcast voice remote alongside it.

I’m thinking, just a dumb IR target stuck to the bottom of the TV, when the cable box is the only input to the AVR, may be appropriate.

I'm noticing the same. If we could depend on CEC, we wouldn't need the IR for simple setups.

I'm thinking of using Raspberry Pi or similar to monitor the CEC buss and add commands as necessary for reasonable integration. Currently the cable boxes in my area seem to ignore Power commands. I don't know if pressing the Power button would put something on the CEC buss that Pi could detect and take appropriate action.

I went back to IR systems a few years back when the local FiOptics provider boxes would not work with URC RF remotes

I have a project where we are removing the Crestron remotes just to have Xfinity Voice control. Hoping the IR repeater will work with the Denon AVR for consistent power control of the AVR. This is a client who would spend the money for Josh if it did more than very basic voice control.

??


That means depending on HDMI, so, yeah, probably no luck there. Ever.

And this is the second time I've seen this mentioned in passing:

I don't pay enough attention to this fault to remember the detail, but for ever and ever DirecTV remotes would turn Yamaha Receivers on but not off, making even that little amount of integrated control impossible.

Has anybody made a list of what remotes will only turn something ON, or only turn something OFF, to help us avoid ever trying to use them? edmund?

I'm not sure how valuable that list will be. I have a customer with a mixed multi-room system Comcast-SONY-SAMSUNG-SONOS There is an HDMI splitter for the Blu-ray player. After months of stable operation, the SAMSUNG IR TV commands started turning ON the SONY TV in another room. Eventually, I worked through the issue with CEC defeaters. I'm only saying "worked through" because I have low confidence about claiming "fixed".

I'm most suspicious about the SONY TV. Initially the system was fine, then we had intermittent audio issues between the SONY TV and a SONOS BEAM. I switched from HDMI to optical. Things were fine for a few months., then there were more audio issues. I found some SONY options that I didn't recall from prior. Then it didn't seem to matter between HDMI and optical, so I went back to HDMI. This is a proudly anti-tech customer. I can't rule out the customer pressing something.

You don't know who Josh is?

Nope. And I'm not joshin' you.

Ernie: Introducing Josh.

I’m amazed that people still use cable boxes

It depends on what you want to watch. Use the box(s) that support the content that you want to view.

I don't blame anyone that does.  The streaming game is a pita, you have to get multiple services to cover everything, if you watch a lot of different content.  With the cost of all the different streaming services constantly rising, there isn't really that much savings, or in some cases, no savings when you go with multiple services.

+1

For most of my clients, they already subscribe to Netflix, they are Prime members, they like Apple+, maybe one or two more. Those don’t change. The difference is Comcast TV service plus rental on a half dozen boxes, which could easily be $200, in exchange for YouTube TV at $65. I have never seen it be anywhere near a push, always a significant savings.

Yeah, but then you have use You Tube TV lol.

When it comes up in the field, I tell people to use a comcast box on the main/daily driver TV, then use the comcast app on the rest of the TVs (that aren't used near as much).

The main issue for me is I like to watch the Twins in the Summer (as with many home teams in many markets). The local sports issue seems to be the biggest hurdle for the streaming services. Therefore, I still have basic cable.