After many trials and tribulations I finally have a functional remote. The test was handing the the remote to the non-techie wife today to see if she could figure things out and she mostly aced it with just some slight instruction on my part. I'm still leaning pretty heavily on the SmartRemote template button assets for the time being but they look nice and get the job done. I have added some of my own graphics and modified things with drop shadows and the like where I felt like it made sense to do so for my needs.
It was pretty slow going for awhile because I was hell bent on integrating Harmony and it was a total disaster. Once I got it through my thick skull that I didn't need to do this things started to come together. I still have a BUNCH to do but I feel like I have a scalable and mostly modular base to work from now.
For now I'm still kind of using the Harmony paradigm because I'm comfortable with it after all these years. When you turn on the remote the index page is mostly made up of "activities" at the top of the list and "devices" at the bottom, though I may eventually separate them out into their own sections in order to minimize clutter. I've added a dedicated back button to the bottom left of every page because I couldn't come up with a hard button configuration I was satisfied with. On the index page I left it the default blue/gray button color to indicate that you can't go back any further, though on every other page I made it a red gradient so it stands out more (the wife struggled to figure out how to go back a page before I changed the color). In the bottom right of every page there's an indicator of the volume level of the receiver so I can disable the receiver's ugly-ass OSD from coming up every stinking time I turn the volume up or down, and it updates in real time. That OSD is something I absolutely despise and being able to get rid of it was HIGH on my list of wants when I was deciding which remote platform to go with. The SmartRemote handles this beautifully, and sometimes it's the little things that bring the most joy.
We don't have cable and use our Nvidia Shields pretty extensively for streaming. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that AndroidTV has a feature that lets you jump to apps directly from the remote and that it's already integrated into myServer6, but I wasn't too jazzed that it's not editable/configurable. Basically, you get what you get and you don't get upset. At the suggestion of stanger69 and davep I opted to scrap the automated scrolling list and recreated each button myself using LAUNCH commands for the services I use most frequently. Strangely this doesn't work with SmartTube or CuriosityStream but I have a solution in the works for this using a FLIRC that I should be able to work in sometime later this week. Also, I really REALLY dislike that there is no long press functionality to be had with the SmartRemote. I use this extensively with the Shield but I think I might be able to solve this as well with the FLIRC. We shall see what I can come up with so fingers crossed.
The Apple TV IP integration leaves something to be desired when it comes to speed. Right now I'm using IR because it's just SO much faster but my understanding from DaveP is that there's a rewrite of the driver in the works that should speed things up significantly. When that happens it should be trivial to switch over to IP and that's one more device I can get off of IR entirely. Can't wait!
I'm still stuck with IR on my bluray player, Xbox, and PS5 and I doubt there will ever be IP driver functionality for these devices. C'est la vie I'll get over it. The IP2IR is getting the job done for these devices. It's fast at issuing commands and so far seems pretty reliable.
My Samsung TV does NOT play nicely when switching inputs with the Tizen driver but for the most part works with the Samsung driver for older tv's. In general I prefer it anyway since the Tizen driver needs to bring up the source menu on my screen whenever I switch inputs. The only command I can't get working correctly is volume but I can't really say that bothers me. There's an audio system hooked up to every tv in the house so I don't anticipate that this will ever be a problem. There were some issues with getting the set to turn on for awhile, but once RoyN pointed out that the MAC address of the tv doesn't get pulled in with the IP pairing process I went and added it manually and now the set works with complete reliability. Nice!
The Denon driver works fine for basic controls like on/off, changing source, and volume up/down/mute. Anything beyond that is not available via IP. That's not Allonis's fault, but what is hella annoying is that Denon's IR codes aren't available from the GlobalCache database in myServer6. This means I'm going to have to figure out how to manually import these codes into the IR database, and there's a LOT of them. OTOH once the commands are installed it's trivial to edit them directly from myServer if necessary. Thank you David I really appreciated the tip on how to do this it saved me a TON of hassle with my HDMI matrix!
All in all I'm pretty satisfied. The remote is for the most part pretty fast and responsive, the screen looks great, and once you are well acquainted with myServer and myDesigner making adjustments is pretty trivial. There are definitely some things I want to see addressed though. The lack of long press capability is by FAR the most important for me. This can easily be done with remotes that cost a tiny fraction of what this system does. The lack of a functional backlight is another biggie, though I get it that Allonis was completely caught off guard by this. These things probably aren't a big deal in a commercial installation but can be pretty agonizing to deal with in a home theater environment.
Anyhoo, my long ramble is mercifully at an end. I just needed a place to let out a whole bunch of stuff that's been rolling around in my head for several days now and even mentioning any of this to my wife would be like speaking a foreign language. For anyone interested (and who made it all the way to the end lol) I did post a few pics of my remote screens on Google photos and hopefully they can be viewed
here
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I hope everyone had a great weekend! Talk to you all soon!
