Isn’t it great when your SigOther decides that you really need to pick up a new gadget? My wife recently got sick of keeping 2 remotes around while watching DVDs and signed off on the idea of buying a universal remote. I picked up this one, the Universal Remote Control URC-300 “Customizer” (whew!), which was a steal at $50 on Amazon. After a few weeks with it I thought I’d bless my vast audience with a review.

The pros:

• If you’re patient and your equipment supports discrete on/off and input codes you can make it dirt-simple to perform any entertainment-center-related activity.
• It’s really nice to have a touchscreen with customizable labels. This beats trying to remember that, say, the “info” button is actually the “program” button.
• It’s also really nice to have hard buttons for the majority of operations (like play, stop, volume, channel, etc.).
• Build quality is really good. It feels way solid.
• Great value at $50.
• The documentation is actually legible, not Japanese Engrish.

The cons:

• The programming interface is bad in some very frustrating ways.
• There’s no PC programming interface, which is acceptable at $50 but unacceptable at the original retail price (I think it was $200).
• You have to look at the touchscreen to use it.
• The touchscreen button labels can only contain 5 characters, all-caps. Ouch!
• The thing is somewhat “learning impaired” with certain remotes.
• It has hard buttons for ff/fr but lacks hard buttons for fw/rev skip.

The programming interface deserves a bit of extra attention. In many ways it’s a well-designed interface. There are very few “dump you back to the main menu” moments, so, for example, learning multiple buttons from another remote is about as painless as you could hope for (at least as far as the interface is concerned—the learning performance is another matter). Searching for pre-programmed codes for your devices is also pretty smooth. In general, setting up any single button or device is a fairly pleasant experience.

But then comes the moment when you realize, “gosh, I’d really like to have the DVD device on the lower-right button instead of the upper-left one.” Guess what! You’re in for a world of hurt, my friend. There’s no way to move a device’s location on the touchscreen without re-programming the entire device, including the labels on its touchscreen buttons! Similarly, there’s no way to move a command or macro button without re-learning or re-programming it. This oversight suggests to me that the people who designed this device didn’t actually use it themselves. Who knows, maybe they’re just the sort of people who never change their minds. In any case you’d better be really sure you know how you want things laid out when you start, because you’ll be stuck with your choices.

The other programming faux pas is that there’s no way to use macros within macros. For example, if I program a “turn everything on” macro and put it on some button, then I hit that button while programming a new macro, it doesn’t turn everything on. Instead, it sends whatever IR code used to be assigned to that button. This means there’s no way to build common routines that are reused in other macros. I know I’m a demanding CS guy and all, but I think this would come in handy in lots of situations.

Finally, there’s the issue of PC programmability. PC programmability could ameliorate both of the previous problems in one fell swoop, but alas there is no such thing for the URC-300. But this has another implication, related to discrete on/off and input codes.

What are discrete on/off codes? Imagine you’re writing a “Watch DVD” macro. You probably want something like:

1. Turn on TV
2. Turn on Receiver
3. Turn on DVD Player
4. Put TV on video input
5. Put Receiver on DVD input
6. Put remote control in DVD mode

This will work fine if everything is off when you begin, but what if the TV is already on? If your TV only has a power toggle button, then step 1 turns it off instead of on, which is no good. If you have discrete on/off codes, however, your macro will work just fine no matter what state the power is in at the outset. The “on” code will leave the set on if it’s alread on.

There are many devices that support discrete power and input codes, but don’t include remotes that have separate on/off or input buttons. There’s a chance that one of the preprogrammed codes in the URC-300 has the discretes, but it’s pretty slim. The Remote Central website (yes, there’s a website dedicated to remote controls) has a vast database of these codes, but the only way to get them into your remote is by using a PC to program your remote somehow. That means URC-300 users are out of luck!

Well, we’re not entirely out of luck. For a bit of coin you can buy or build an IR transmitter for your PC (or if you’re lucky like me you can borrow one). You can then use Linux and LIRC (or WinLIRC) to send codes to your remote. There’s a bit of a trick to geting the codes from Remote Central into a format LIRC can understand, but I’m running out of time now so I’ll leave that for another day.