I have not yet purchased a harmony remote but had a quick question. The activity feature sounds great, but it seems like the activities shouldn't be used at all to power on/off multiple components.

Since no state is stored, you wouldn't want "watch a dvd" to turn on the dvd player *and* the tv because the tv may already be on.

How do you guys get around this? Do you explicitly turn on the components or do you have an activity for turn on/off?

Shame that more components don't have explicit on/off buttons. Only my receiver has this. Set top box, tv, dvd player don't.

You have it wrong .... in activity mode state is stored.

In activity mode the harmony maintain the state of the power (whether on or off) and the current selected input for each device.

When you switch activities the harmony knows which devices to turn on or off and which inputs to select. If a device has discrete commands for power or selecting inputs it will always send them as this will ensure that the device is in the correct state no matter what it's previous state was. However if a device only has a power toggle or next input command then it will only send these commands if it thinks it need to.

What this does mean is that you should always use the harmony's activity mode to control your devices so that the harmony's internal state matches the state of your equipment. If you do this then the harmony is ideal for devices that use power toggles.

If for some reason your devices get out of sync with the harmony there is a help button which will take you through a series of questions that will attempt to ensure that the state of your devices matches what the harmony thinks it should be.

It is also possible to specify whether a device should always be left on so that switching activities does not turn it off.

Sweet! Very cool. Sounds even better than I thought then :)

That's not entirely true. Perhaps the Harmony will always send the "power on" command IF the device in question has no delays.

For instance, my TV has a 12 second delay so switching between different activities such as "Watch TV", "Watch Tivo", "Watch VCR", "Watch DVD" (and any other activity that requires that the TV be on) under the scenario you mentioned would cause the Harmony to "block" for 12 seconds until the TV is ready to respond.

Thankfully, that is not the case, because why block for a device that is already responsive? My TV does have discrete power on and power off commands which are used by the Harmony but the TV's power on signal is only sent when the Harmony thinks the TV is off -or- when the same activity is pressed while it is already the current activity (ie. if I press "Watch DVD" followed at some point by "Watch DVD") then it will re-initialize all devices (which will ineffect turn the TV on again).

Phil