I know what the concept means, but using it practically doesn't make sense.

Do you need to create "hidden" devices and/or panels to store "buttons" of all the buttons on the remote that you are using? Or do you do this only if you are using screens over.

NO two screens in my setup look alike, even my keypads were assembled one button at a time. What is the point of creating a "mirror" of these panels if they are unique?

Unless some of these use the same code (say my vcr button no "1" on the key pad is the same as the "1" on my TV remote), but to figure that out would be more wastefull to me than just learning the code for each button.
Now if I use a VERSION of a screen....say the arrow buttons for moving around a screen, and I use this same feature on several panels in the same device, then yes I can see how alias can be helpful, if I change the code for the "main" one the other changes as well.

I am making my ccf look as much as possible to the original remotes, the layouts and screens are only being modified due to lack of room, or in some cases I am regrouping or making redundant keys because I want them on the screens I use most.

RB

If all your buttons are unique (in what they control) and you have no Macros (buttons that do more then one thing like turn on TV, Receiver and DVD and change the input) then you don't need to Alias anything. But if you have a Macro or repeating keys then using Alias is a good idea.

An Alias = do what the button aliased is doing. It saves memory (I know it is not a big concern with the new systems) and it makes changes easier (you don't need to change the on command for the new DVD on all the keys that turn it on, only on the main one)

The Idea of hidden IR code pages is used to make it easier to change the CCF with less repercussions 1) since all the commands are in one place you know where to find and change them, 2) since no one will use them you can squeeze them all on one page (per device), 3) you cannot "move" buttons from one panel to the next, you must copy and paste it. if there is an alias to this button it is now lost.

I hope this answers some of your questions instead of making things more complicated

Raymond,

You are right. You don't need aliases most of the time, but they make things much easier for tweaking things. I'll describe how I use aliases. Others probably will too. You can decide for yourself if it's useful or not.

Every device in my ccf has a hidden panel with all the buttons for that remote on it. These buttons have the actual code on them. I typically have 2 or 3 panels per device. I create the needed buttons on each of these panels and then alias them to the hidden panel buttons.

I have macros that turn my system on to a given state. For example, Watch VCR does the following:

1) Power on TV
2) Power on VCR
3) Power on Receiver
4) Set TV Input to AUX
5) Set Receiver to VCR

I don't remember right now but I think you have to alias things in macros. So you have to alias to the appropriate buttons in each device. True, it's easy enough to alias to whichever button on any panel you need. The problem I ran into was that I had the same button on each panel in a device. Power for instance. If I later decide to adjust my panels and remove the Power button from one of my panels, I was sometimes deleting the button that the macro was referencing. Or worse, I had the actual code stored on one button on one panel and aliased to it on the other. I then deleted the button with the code on it, causing the other one with the alias to be useless. (In this case, since codes take up space, I was aliasing to conserve memory).

There are also cases where I might not have a use for all of the original buttons when I first create the device. I still learn the codes for these buttons to the hidden panel so I don't have to do it later.

As you can see from my description there is nothing that careful Prontoedit work can't overcome but I found it to be the easiest way to create and tweak devices.

Here is another example of alias use which is quite device dependent of course. I have a 300 disc changer. I can input the album name and artist for each CD (only 12 chars per item but good enough). I didn't wait long enough to get one with keyboard input though :-( I had originally created a program on my HP calculator to send the appropriate codes to enter the information given a simple database. The IR range isn't very good and it wasn't 100% reliable so I switched to using the Pronto. I did this because it's a pain entering text info with the Phone pad style of input (Press "2" once for 2, twice for A, three times for B etc.) So, I created a macro panel with all the letters, numbers and special characters on it. "A" would alias the "2" button on my CD's hidden panel twice for instance. I created a new device that will input the title/artist with a single button press. Each CD has a macro list that looks something like this:

1) Alias to CD player's INPUT TITLE button.
2) Alias to "A" in the macro panel.
3) Alias to each character in the album name...
4) Alias to INPUT TITLE again to switch to artist input
5) Alias to each character in artist name.
6) Alias to INPUT TITLE again to finish up.

And no, I didn't do 24+ aliases for 300 cds. I wrote a visual basic program to do it for me using the CCF compiler and decompiler programs found in the files section here.

I hope this helps a little.