LogitechHarmony 650 Infrared All in One Remote Control, Universal Remote Logitech, Programmable Remote (Silver)

I originally bought and set this up in 2010 and just replaced it with the same model. It still was working fine but the Watch TV button finally started to get a little flaky. This makes sense, it’s the one that gets pressed the most. I was satisfied with 9 years of daily use and bought the same one again. The new one went right into service with no problems. I think I’ll get another one now just to keep on hand for when this new one gives up in 10 years.My setup:Yamaha receiverPanasonic plasma TVFrontier Fios cable/dvrXbox One (also used for DVD and Blu-Ray)Raspberry Pi with KodiRaspberry Pi with RetropieNintendo WiiNintendo GameCubeNintendo N64Note that the GameCube and N64 are not programmed as devices. You can’t control them with IR anyway, you have to use the game controllers and you will have to manually turn on the power switch. But you can still use the remote to set up the custom activities “Play GameCube” and “Play N64”. These activities will power up the TV, power up the receiver, and switch the receiver to whatever AV connection you are using for the game. Thus in this way you can sort of use more than 8 devices.This remote also can operate the Xbox One menus for non game stuff like watching Youatube and it also nicely runs all functions of Kodi media center on the Rasberry Pi with a Flirc controller installed. Nice!Amazingly this same remote is still in the Logitech product line all these years later, and thankfully so. This is about as good as you are going to get and the price is great compared to the far more expensive new models. It’s simple and it’s effective. It gets the job done. Just read all the reviews on those expensive new models and see if you think people are getting a better experience for hundreds of dollars more. Even after all these years and with all of the brains and technology in the world, it seems no one can solve the riddle of the universal remote. Spend all the money you want, none are perfect and there will always be frustration with the setup and operation. Some of this has to do with the zillion different things out there that need to be controlled, some has to do with the lack of comprehensive standards, and some has to do with the inherent limitations of the technology. At least with this one you won’t spend a lot of money, and in my experience it will work fine if you understand the limitations.Basically, as others have said, you simply must keep the remote pointed at your system until everything has had a chance to turn on and switch to the correct settings. This can take a few seconds, but this is an eternity for people who cannot manage the task and start waving it around as soon as they press a button. You can avoid 90% of all your problems if you simply keep that remote pointed towards the equipment until it is done! It really is as simple as that.If you mess this up, things will “get out of sync”. For example, the remote might think the tv is on when it is really off. So things won’t work right. You can press Help and the built-in wizard will extract you from your mess, MOST of the time. If not, just manually turn everything off and start over, and this time, you got it, KEEP IT POINTED RIGHT, and then it will work.Seriously, I can sit my bloated fat butt on the couch, day in and day out for months on end, using this remote hundreds and hundreds of times to watch TV, watch movies, watch YouTube, play video games, and on and on, and it will work flawlessly every single time. Then I hand it to someone else to watch TV, and after they inevitably ask me “how do I use it to watch TV?” I say “press the button that says ‘Watch TV’ (DUH) and keep it pointed at the TV until everything is on”. And they inevitably mess it up and holler “it’s not working! What do I do now?”. And why is this so? Because they did not keep it pointed at the TV, that’s why.Note that this is not a limitation of this particular remote, this is due to the inherent limitations of the technology. When you want to do something like watch TV on a full theater system, you are using a macro in the remote to accomplish this. A macro is nothing more than a series of IR commands sent out to the different parts of the system, such as: 1) turn on the tv, 2) set the tv to the correct input, 3) turn on the receiver, 4) set the receiver to the correct input. These have to be done one after the other, not all at once, in order to make everything work right. It doesn’t take long, but it still does take a few seconds, and those few seconds are just a bit too long for all those people who cannot manage the simple task of keeping the remote pointed in one direction until it is done.The other limitation of the technology is that there is no “state awareness” for the remote. All this means is this: the remote has no way to “know” if the power for your TV or other device is ON or OFF. This is true for any IR remote. In the case of the Harmony remotes, they “assume” that the power is off for everything in your system when you are telling it to turn things on, such as when you want to do something like watch TV. If the remote assumes your TV is off when you press Watch TV and it is actually turned on then it will send the power toggle command and turn your TV off. Now it’s off when it should be on, and you are scratching your head staring dumbly at it and wondering why you cannot see your American Idol. The wizard in the Logitech remotes at least tries to bail you out by using a logic tree and having you press some buttons and answer some questions so it can get everything where it should be.Even the All Off button is not guaranteed to turn everything off. Because if something is ALREADY OFF when it thinks it is ON then the All Off button will turn it ON! Got that?For anyone still reading this far, this situation is due to the common use of the single “toggle” power button, that is, the button you press on your TV, receiver, or whatever to turn the power on and to turn the power off. This translates to an IR remote code that simply toggles the power to the opposite of whatever state it is in. Now some components also use what is called “discrete” IR signals. This is a fancy way of saying there is one code to power off and a different code to power on. If the component is on and you send it a discrete on code, it simply ignores it and stays on. But if you send it a discrete off code then it turns off. This is a much more nifty way to turn things on and off with a remote, because now the All Off button could be 100% reliable to actually turn everything off, and this would give you a foolproof bailout if you mess it up (by now, you should know how you messed it up right?). If things aren’t right you could just hit the All Off button and everything would go off and then the remote would have a known starting point for you to try again. Sadly, many components don’t use the discrete power codes, only the toggle codes. Which means, if you messed up and didn’t get something turned on then when you press All Off you will actually turn that one on. Then when you press your command which will logically send the power toggle command to turn on, it will promptly turn OFF! Now, you have truly descended into madness and have thrown your remote through the TV screen.30 years of consumer electronics and we are all still stuck in this same boat. We’ll have flying cars before this gets solved.

I had the same problem that most people shopping for something like this have: too many complicated remotes. In my case, I had 3: TV, Receiver and DVR. The DVR remote was what I was using before to "attempt" to control all of my devices, but it simply didn't have buttons for all of the functions I wanted to use and required manually changing inputs to control each device. The receiver remote could control the TV and Receiver, but not the DVR. The TV remote only controlled the TV. No matter which way I tried, it was a mess and my wife couldn't stand it. She was never sure what to press, especially when it came to inputs on the receiver since we have 2 game consoles as well going through the receiver.I saw all the negative reviews about the remote resetting but decided to give it a try. I am SO glad I did. This remote can finally do everything I need so I can actually only use 1 remote! I didn't fully realize how aggravating having multiple remotes was until I set this thing up. The most impressive part is that my wife has commented multiple times how much she loves it! She's not too big into tech, but she does like watching TV and loves how simple it is now to press 1 button and no matter what my receiver's last input was on, she's watching TV and able to access all of the features of our DVR that she uses.Setting the remote up was actually fun (I like playing around with tech products) and luckily, I didn't run into attempting to do anything that I couldn't do.For setting up the remote, I followed the instructions for setting up an account with myharmony.com and installing the software. You connect the remote to the computer with the provided USB cable, and then you can use the website/software to customize the remote and "sync" the changes to the remote when done. I had maybe 1 time where the sync got messed up and I had to unplug the remote and try again, but other than that syncing worked fine.First off, this remove is "activity" based. In other words, when you set up your activity to watch TV, you select which devices are involved in that activity. You also set up which inputs your TV and receiver (or any other device) are on. It needs to know this to know which devices to power on/off and which inputs to select when turning on. It also assigns some key functions to the buttons that generally work for the type of setup you're doing, like making sure the channel buttons are used for the DVR and not the TV. There is the option to go to device mode and do commands for each device, but I generally don't use that since the remote allows you to map each button on each activity, so if I need to do anything, I have it mapped somewhere. It's also nice to add functions that you can select on the LCD screen, so I put functions there that don't have a button that would make sense and also for buttons I don't use as often (like the aspect ratio setting on my TV that I change very rarely). It also works well while changing activities, only changing what it needs to. For instance, if I'm watching TV and want to switch to playing XBox, I go to More Activities, select the option I created for my XBox, and it simply changes the input on my receiver. Also, with activities, when you press the button to power off, it knows which devices it turned on and turns those off.As far as setting it up, my main challenge was my DVR. It's a Motorola and the thing is terrible at picking up IR signals. I'm fairly certain it's the IR emitted by my plasma TV causing issues, but the bottom line was that I couldn't count on a single "power on" to work. I would always leave my DVR on anyway (all turning it off does is stop the video signal) so I wanted to change my Watch TV to not toggle the power. Unfortunately when I went to edit the activity, I couldn't disable the power toggles since I had selected the DVR as part of the activity. However, I went to the settings for the DVR, and thankfully there was an option to always leave it on and not send the power commands. It would have been nice to be able to fully customize the activity to stop the power on/off, but at least I had a way to do it. First potential issue diverted.After that, the hardest thing was figuring out what buttons I wanted mapped. At first, I was messing with device settings instead of activity settings, which didn't work as well. After reading some more reviews on how people said they only use activity and not device mode, I decided to do that and map all the functions I wanted on the activity and ignore the device options. That has worked great and simplified my setup. Now when I Watch TV, I have everything I need mapped to a button or LCD screen option.I also like the option to add favorite channels. You can add them with text or with icons. There's a website that has icons for the major TV networks, so I used the icons in my favorites and can easily identify the channel I want to go to instead of reading the text. Both options are nice to have so you don't have to remember channels and key in the 2-4 digit channel codes.I also like how the back-light for the buttons turns on when the remote detects that it's picked up. As others have mentioned though, the activity buttons at the top aren't back-lit, which doesn't make sense and is the one main con I can think of with this remote.Another cool thing is that you can change certain settings for each device, like the delay between button presses in case it sends the commands too fast for your device to handle. In my case, the favorite channels weren't work as well with my DVR and digits would get lost fairly often. I lowered the speed and now the favorites are more reliable.I did have a scare the other night where my remote was doing the dreaded "reset" and then thinking nothing was turned on. I decided to start with what I was hoping was the simplest fix: dead batteries. Luckily, I changed them to my Eneloop rechargeables and it's been working fine since. The regular batteries that came with the remote lasted almost 4 months, which I think is good considering the LCD screen and how much we use it.The remote also has a help button that you can press if things get out of sync. So far in the few times that has happened to me (my TV didn't get the power-on signal a few times), it attempted to turn everything back on and on the right input and it fixed the situation. It's nice that it can do that so you don't have to manually toggle power and inputs on devices with your old remotes to get things working again.Other reviews have mentioned that some people make the mistake of selecting an activity like watching TV, and then putting the remote down immediately. This can be an issue when devices are off and the activity requires the switching of inputs on something like a TV or receiver, as it has to wait a certain amount of time for the device to power on before it would be able response to the input change. The remote does show on the LCD screen that it's still working on starting the activity, and the note goes away once it sends the final commands. While it may be confusing to some, it is necessary to do it this way so I at least give the remote props for showing that it still needs to be pointed at the devices.Overall, I love this device so much I could kick myself for not getting one sooner. Luckily I haven't had the reset issue (besides the batteries going dead) and I'm hoping that it lasts a long time. It has made controlling my AV setup a joy instead of a pain, and for that, it gets a full 5 stars!