I purchased an MX-500 a month or two ago and have yet to get it out of the box (moving, unpacking, etc..) and I am just about ready to give it a go. For the purposes of this discussion, all one needs to know is that I have 2 HDVR2 Hughes DirecTIVO receivers with the peanut remotes.

As posted by trockman in the seventh message of this thread:

[Link: remotecentral.com]

he describes his TIVO setup and keyboard layout. This layout includes putting "Playlist on PREV CHAN and TIVO Menu on DISPLAY and Enter on ENTER", just as an example. While seemingly ergonomic, I see the "wife acceptance factor" diminishing rapidly having these specialized TIVO functions on keys labelled something completely different. Obviously, there are no hard button labels to correspond to a multitude of TIVO functions.

Does anyone have any strong opinions concerning the WAF, the MX-500 and a TIVO unit? In addition, does anyone have any suggestions to please the wife-unit?

Eric

In general, WAF can be increased by making things logical, and in case of confusion - match the labels. That's one of the reasons I love the MX lineup - the customizeable LCD screen means that even a stranger can pick it up and know what the buttons do!

My advice- Put any buttons not obvious on the hard buttons onto the LCD panel and give them a clear label. That should help!

I agree, for WAF-compatibility, use the LCD buttons (doesn't also stop you putting some of them on the hard buttons for ergonomics). Because of my shortcuts I rarely use the TIVO menu but I put it on the Display button so that it would work in my macros, particularly my FAV macros.

I programmed my MX-500 for my Tivo to mimic as much as possible the same buttons for the same actions performed by other devices. This goes for obvious ones like "Pause" and "Fast Forward" and "Rewind", which act the same for my Tivo, two DVD players, VCR and laserdisc. In the LCD screen, I have buttons for the same functions (like flipping the TV to the video input for the current device and flipping the A/V receiver to the audio input for the current device or cycling through the screen stretch modes for the HDTV) defined in the same positions with the same text for all devices. I also define similar macros using the device-labeled buttons for each device. For example, if you press the "Cable" button long enough to start the macro, it turns on the TV, the A/V receiver and the cable box plus flips the TV to the cable input and the A/V receiver to the cable input. If you press the "Tivo" button long enough to start the macro, it does the same thing for the Tivo (other than turning on the Tivo, which never turns off).

I was afraid my wife would hate the MX-500 and think it was just another complex toy for me. After a couple of days, she loved it and was glad we were able to retire eight separate remotes to a junk drawer and use only the MX-500.

I'll have to agree with the others here... personally, I prefer to keep the hard buttons as close to their labeled purpose as possible. For Tivo, the button layout seems to work very well for me as-is. Granted, I have the MX-700, which has one extra button in that area. But for me, the guide button goes to the guide, the info button brings up the display, exit is clear, enter is enter, prev channel is prev channel, and menu is menu. The only "non-standard" thing I've done is putting the instant replay on the stop button, since stop has no meaning to TiVo. I don't really see the need to map the playlist to anything, since it can so quickly be accessed by hitting menu twice. I do have some macros in the LCD buttons that go directly to things like the wish-list, etc., but those get used very rarely.

I've found the MX-700 button layout to work very well for TiVo, and I LOVE the fact that when I switch between TiVo and my HD receiver, the remote works the same way (guide is guide, menu is menu, etc., etc., etc.)

My Wife really like the MX-500. We have a Dish Player, not Tivo but here is how I have it set up:
MX vs Dish remote
play is play
stop is stop
ff is ff
rr is rr
rec is rec
track skip back is 7 sec replay
track skip forward is 30sec. skip
Guide is on LCD
Menu is on LCD
Info is on LCD

It is very easy to use. The best remote ever!

~Jay

I am thinking of buying an MX500 for my setup including two Directivos. I know my poor old fingers will have trouble with the rocker switch and select button in the center. I am thinking of giving the select key a bogus # and stop will then become select, about like a TIVO Peanut.