Hi all,

Great resource!

Just got a 520, have it mostly figgered out. A couple of things I'd like to clarify if someone would be so kind...

A. My older Sony Wega TV allows for aspect ratio adjustment by entering the TV's main menu and arrowing through a bunch of stuff. I've set up a custom activity to cover that. No problem. But the other day while browsing what the 520 *thinks* the Sony can do via remote, I saw "aspect". Clicking it however, does nothing. It just seems a little odd to me that aspect would be a choice in the commands even though it doesn't work. Shall I assume that's a dormant feature embedded in the Sony remote, meant for another model, like the PIP command, which also doesn't apply to my TV? Am I making sense?

I'm mostly curious because I used to use a Sony unified remote with macro capability and had a macro set up to change the aspect ratio to 16:9 for letterbox movies. The macro blazed through the commands so fast I could barely see it. On the 520, even with the button delays set to 0ms, the same macro goes much slower...not painfully slow, but considerably slower. It's also kinda annoying because since I'm relegated to a custom activity, upon activating the 16:9 macro, I then have to click "devices" and "DVD player" to regain control over the movie. I guess I wish there was a way to easily merge my 16:9 commands into the DVD activity. I assume there's not. Not really interested in manually programming all the DVD buttons onto the 16:9 activity or vice-versa...

B. I set up the 520 to work as the Apple remote I use for my iPod/Universal dock. Again, no problem. However, I had to set it up as a custom activity because the 520 insists on having my cable box or my TV involved in their stock digital music activity. Is this just a limitation of the 520 software, or am I missing something? I could not delete the cable box from the activity, so I trashed the entire activity and made the custom one. No big deal really, but it took an extra 5 minutes to create the button commands.

Overall, I wish the software was a little less militant about what devices the remote insists I need to run activities. Maybe you folks can hip me to something I'm doing wrong.

Thanks!

-Rob

A1. The Harmony IR database for the Sony TV will contain commands for the entire Sony TV line (not just your particular model). So some commands like PIP may not work on a particular model.

A2. Why don't you teach your unified Sony remote macro to your Harmony remote? Teach it to the TV device under a single command name.

B. You are not doing anything wrong. That is the reason for the existence of the "Generic" (custom) activity.

Thanks. I did teach the macro to the Harmony...it just executes it a lot slower than the old Sony remote.

Yes but did you teach it as a single command (in RAW mode)? Not activity macro.

Hmm. I made an activity and named it 16:9. It's independent of any other devices besides the TV. Is that raw mode?

No - you need to add a single IR command to the harmony using your old remote to send the macro from the sony remote. Raw mode is an option when you're learning IR commands and it prevents the harmony from interpreting the IR command.

Ahh, cool. I'll try that now. Thanks!

Worked like a charm. Thanks again.