The 880 has a dedicated FAV button which is handy to put auto number inserts of your favorite channels. We do this as some devices have limited favorites memory. Then when a Favorite channel drops off the page one can easily select it by hitting FAV and selecting the channel, it auto populates the numbers; say "4096" and the Cable device just jumps to the channel.

Seems like the only way to do it is to set up a FAV Device button and keep adding buttons then assign it to something.

Is that the best way to deal with it?

Why not add favorites on the device pages. You can always use a jump to directly go to a given page if they are not on the main device page.

As a generality, regardless of the remote platform. I setup groups of stations, such as "News", "Movies", "Sports", "Kids", etc. The exact approach depends on the number of buttons or screen real estate available. The goal is to have quick access to stations in each group.

I find that a given individual often has a relatively short list of stations that will probably fit on one screen. If this is the case, then the groups become "Jane's" or "John's" stations.

For day to day operation, one does not need to adjust any cable box settings. Rather than jumping to a cable box control page, the "Watch TV" button jumps to a favorites page.

I used to do favorites until Comcast switched from ultra reliable Motorola boxes to Pace and others. You just can’t get four or five button pushes in a macro to work every time.

Thanks, I just REALLY miss the FAV button on the 880. Personally I think other remotes have gone downhill since they were discontinued.

I have set up a Favorites Node and cannot figure how to add Station Icons to the Buttons. All I can do is name the button(s) CBS, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, etc. but cannot figure out how to add the nice station Icon pics to the button.

Is this even possible with the 890?

it's quite possible.  you need to set up a folder with your custom favorite buttons within the CCP/MX890 images folder.

this is the path on my computer:  C:\Program Files (x86)\Universal Remote Control, Inc\Complete Control Program\MX-890\Images

it should be similar on yours.  save your folder there, and then you can navigate to the folder within CCP.

Interesting, what format do the buttons need to be? There are only vfd libraries in the existing ones. If I were to create appropriate jpg buttons would that work? do you know what resolution they are?

Thanks

.png would be recommended since that handles transparency.  I'm not sure if .jpg would work; never tried it.

240x70 for the wide buttons that span across to both buttons
120x70 for the single buttons

I have 2 versions for every button.  one is a normal state, and the other is a pressed state.

I know how to do that on a 980, but not on the 890. I just looked and there does not appear to be an image selection option.

What am I missing?

click on the button that you want to change, then look in the properties tab.  it will show two images, one normal and one pressed.  click the icon that shows an arrow pointing down (Import) 

that will open an Image Browser window.  use the drop down menus to locate your folder.

Ah yes, my screen was not large enough. Sorry.....

I copied some buttons to the images directory and it does not see them. But I will keep trying now I can see the button graphics.

I figured it out, THANK YOU!

cool, glad you got it figured out.

the mx890 is nice, but the downloads take forrrrreeeeeevvvvveeeeerrrrrr.

I noticed that if you create a new button (it defaults to a Grey background and then black for pressed. It automatically puts the pressed graphic in for you.

Regardless it is all good and working.

Thanks again.

I struggled with that until I figured out that the numeric buttons are really a progressive search. You must wait until each button’s search results are posted — else you risk skipped digits. This means that the required wait time between digits is somewhat dependent on the current program lineup. If a bunch of stations need to be displayed after a digit, you must wait longer before entering the next digit. An additional annoyance is that a cable box update or change of box might upset the timing. When I use a native remote I typically press too fast and digits are skipped. The only solution in a control program is to insert delays between digits.

If your control platform supports the feature, you can make the delay symbolic and change a single variable to adjust the timing. Another, messier approach would be to define ten digit macros and each of these macros includes a delay. In this case you call digit macros from the channel buttons. If you need to adjust the timing, you only need to deal with the ten digit macros.

Ideally your control platform supports functions and you can pass the station channel number as a string. The channel function can deal with delays and speed ups, such as inserting ‘enter’ after three digit channels, rather than waiting for a timeout.

I have an xFinity Box and use favs on my 880's. All I have is a 0.1s delay between numbers and rarely get any dropouts.