I am not sure that I fully understand the Punch Through button concept. Well, I think I do, but I have a feeling that I am missing something.

The Power Off button is fine - simply turn everything off. But what do you do with the Power On button?

You would not want to turn everything on would you? I rarely watch DVDs, for example. I would usually only turn that device on when I selected that activity.

So the choices are
1. turn everything on (seems a waste of power and incorrect)
2. turn on core devices (ie amplifier). But what if there are no core devices?

Volume punch through is fine - you would (I presume) always adjust the central amplifier volume.

You are confusing the concepts of macros vs. punch-throughs. Read the manual a little, search a little here and then get back to us.

Punch through allows you to access certain commands from a device other than the one which is currently selected. A real world example would be if you are watching something via your cable box, but you have the sound routed through an external receiver. In this case, you would punch through the volume and mute commands from your receiver to the cable box. Once you do this, the volume and mute buttons will control the reciever, and all of the other buttons will continue to control the cable box. There are other ways to accomplish the same thing, but punch through is a very convenient tool because it allows you to quickly route the desired commands to many devices at once (i.e. TiVo, DVD, Sat, etc...).

Not at all - I certainly know the difference!

I understand completely why you would have volume punch through, and also Power Off punch through. In fact, these are the only two functions the manual talks about.

The thing is, when you select Power punch through, you are also selecting Power On punch through. I can see no real use for that. In fact, it is counter-intuitive. Since URC know what they are doing (presumably), and I do not, I was wondering what I am missing in my understanding.

Some people leave certain equipment running all the time, like their STB or PVR, so Power punch-through could be handy at times. Not a huge feature though.

I'm sure there are other uses for it.

As of now, the Power On and Power Off are in a single puch thru option. There's some discussion that URC will break out the On and Off to separate punch thru's.

That would be good. I could use that.

From what I saw of your programming, that wouldnt help anything

for power on, the macro ALWAYS sends the system on to watch tv or SAT wgich ever is the standard on the job and works identical to TV. Eliminates confusion for those who want to turn something on to watch TV. Id prefer not to have the button.

Power off is a macro used to turn off the entire system and to return to watch page 1 . Never any individual codes here. This is always punched thru to all devices.

if the system always uses an AVR volume would be punched thru for all devices. If you have cable music genres under listen, the numbers from the cable box in watch would be punched thru to cable music in listen.

make sense?

Good suggestion, including the return to WATCH page 1. Thanks.


I agree about not having the ON button. But your approach mitigates the problem pretty well. Making ON behave the same way as "Watch > TV" covers the clueless user (no offense intended).