After reading numerous reviews and posts, I went ahead and bought the MX-700. Even after the surprise of finding a serial cable with the remote and the time it took to get the serial-usb adapter functioning, I am thrilled with the remote.

Being a newbie, I have a couple of questions.

1. The first deals with the favorite channels. I have 2 satellite boxes. A Mitsubishi HD box and a Sony Ultimate TV box. I have programed the favorites with the codes for both boxes, but was wondering if there is another way to do this?

2. Is there a way to program the remote to make it SIMPLE for my wife to operate. She was tired of having 5 remotes and having to figure out what buttons to push to watch her Lifetime movie. So, I'm wondering if anyone can suggest some programming ideas to simplify the procedures. I've thought of using the devices as tasks, so there would be TV, TIVO (since Ultimate TV won't fit), Movie, Radio, CD, Satellite Music, etc... but I don't know how this will work.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Adam

Adam,

Lots of good suggestions here for the taking. Read through the posts and threads for most of them. I can only help you in the way Ihavemine programmed.

I abandoned the favorite channels features for my wife. One more 'master' button to press to get to the favorite channels once the tv is on. So what I did was have the main power macro turn everything on in the system, and select the correct input for cable and have the macro end on the cable LCD page on the remote. Then, I used the 4 pages of cable device for station names and macros to those stations. So after pressing on, she only has to push the page button to go through the different 'favorites' pages.

Now she wants to know how the RTV is accessed. So my first main page has all the device names and macros for setting the system to those devices. LIke Cable, dvd, RTV, HDTV, OTA etc... But I put a pause at the start of each of those macros of half a second. Now, the user needs to hold down the button for .5 seconds to get the macro started. SO inadvertant button presses only take the remote to the device page, not actually committing to the macro. A simple push of main gets her back to the main page. SO to go from cable to RTV, she just pushes main, then holds down RTV for half a second. The receiver switches to the RTV input, the tv switches to the s video input and the remote switches to the rtv page. Same thing for DVD, OTA, CD and other sources.

It would be MUCH more difficult without discrete input commands at both the receiver and the TV. So hopefully you have those.

Those are my tricks. Good luck with it. I am constantly tweaking my setup - its always changing as I use it and see what could be done better.

E. J.

anyone know how to get the tv discretes for input setting for a sony tv, using the mx 500... considering either getting urc or one for all remote to use jp1.

I am sure the OFA should have the Sony discrete codes. Go to [Link: hifi-remote.com] and look there first

Adam, give her time. she will "get it" eventually. I came home one day and my kids were watching the Monsters Inc. DVD. i asked them who turned it on for them and they said "mommy". wow, she was listening.