I am assembling an HTPC for use in my living room and need a little direction in the way of the overwhelming remote selection. You can find out details of my rig at:
[Link: linuxquestions.org]As you can see, steering me away from the joys of freedom and flexibility that come with open source is going to be hard (for you Windows MCE fans). I have nothing against Windows or MS. I am not one of these people who switched to linux on a vendetta against capitalism, software patents, or Bill Gates. I switched to linux because most distros and software are gratis (free as in beer), and not hampered by nearly as many legal restrictions (free as in speech).
Since I will be using LIRC being controlled by Myth to operate an external IR receiver and one or two external IR transmitters and probably even using an IR keyboard/mouse, I have all of the flexibility in the world. I can take ANY remote that I want and make it do all of my required tasks, even if it is not programmable or a learning remote. The remote for my Pioneer receiver definitely has enough buttons to do the job!
But I want this to be easy for my wife to operate. Actually, not just easy, but ridiculously simple. I don't want her to have to be changing modes or flipping screens any more than she has to. I don't want to have a remote with 50 buttons on it, only be using 20 or 30 of them, and my wife having to try to remember what each of those 20 or 30 does because the labels on the remote don't correspond with what the buttons do.
I don't want any buttons that I won't be using, hence the traditional 5 (vol up/down, chan/track up/down, pwr) don't even need to be grouped in one particular place.
What I probably need is a learning remote with a touchscreen that I can configure with my computer to put all of the commonly used buttons on a main screen that will be visible most of the time, and maybe a few sub-screens for the less-often used commands.
Do you sense that hard buttons are not my friend? I want a minimum of those. I will configure everything to be operated from the touch screen.
So basically what I need is a remote that supports a few macros, ideally can learn the IR codes that I want it to use (again, LIRC can be programmed to interpret ANY IR codes that I desire and transmit the ones I teach it to my equipment), has a minimum of hard buttons, and can have its display customized via the PC (the ability to do the latter in linux would rock my world, but is probably too tall of an order).
Oh, and price is a MAJOR issue, so please don't suggest one of those $1000 ones that also makes toast, pours wine, and bathes your dogs.
TIA,
J
