One thing about being a busy professional is you learn it's often more efficient to pay people to do jobs you could otherwise do yourself. To that end I have hired an A/V integrator for the system at the new house. I knew I just couldn't devote the hours (and my sanity) to getting it all to work the way I want it to.
Of course, even with an integrator it's a challenge to just cull all of the possibilities down to a concrete and actionable spec they can follow. It's been going well, and the system is basically functional now -- it will be very cool when we finish it all.
In the meantime I'm in the process of defining the next steps for them. As the e-mail below that I sent a few days ago reveals...everything has a depth to it.
Paul, I hope your trip in Florida was enjoyable. Here is the current To Do list (below) just so you can have it all in one place.
One problem we are having is that the remotes are still intermittent. It definitely got better when Carlos installed the second C4 box, but the performance is still unacceptable. Strangely, the most troublesome spot is in the Hearth Room (the remote closest to a C4 box). It works fine most of the time, but it doesn't work enough that it gets quite annoying after a while. Operation of a DVR requires a fair amount of fast forwarding through commercials...so far these remotes are not reliable for that.
I've also noticed an intermittent failure on the TiVo on the Master Bedroom. It seems to go through spells where the audio and video will be interrupted for a second. Audio drops out and the screen goes to noise (not black as was happening on the Blu-Ray).
I also need to talk with you a bit for more clarification on the iPad/iPhone license. We'll soon have two iPads in the house, and we already have two iPhones.
Can we map anything useful to the red 4 button on the remotes, or is that dedicated to C4 specific stuff?
Carlos was never able to get the C4 box in the rack to learn IR commands. Not sure if it's defective or if he didn't have the procedure right, but it's something you should be aware of for the future.
To Do items In no particular order....
• Mount Surround Speakers in basement
• Install and program Sony receiver in basement
• Connect TV in Hearth Room to Marantz receiver for whole house audio. I have the cable for this, but if there is a way to give the same function by routing the audio directly out of the C4 box it seems like we should do that -- maybe that's even more flexible. Need your expertise and opinion here.
• If applicable use the Hearth Room C4 unit to send IR to that TV (freeing up a Cat-5 I can use to put a Mac Mini there eventually)
• Install HDMI cable in basement wall between computer and TV (it doesn't need to be any great HDMI cable so go cheap here)
• Update remotes to cover the following commands and functions
TV
Sleep Timer Menu - I want a button that will run a Macro that will set the TV sleep timer while using any of the five sources (counting the TV itself). We'll have to decide about the best button for that, taking into consideration some of the requests below. Also, I've noticed that when I set the TV to go to sleep manually the C4 never knows about it, so I have to end up powering it back on manually as well. Is there a way to recover from a state where the C4 gets out of sync with the actual state of a device?
Colored buttons (also on BluRay) - Verify these are mapped to same colors on C4
TiVo - TCD-648-250
Live TV (tuner swap) - map to BLUE COLORED BUTTON on C4
Page up and down buttons should do the same function as the channel up and down button (but only when in TiVo control mode)
slow motion -- Put on STAR * button on C4 DONE --- EXCEPT WE MAY NEED TO MOVE THIS TO MAKE ROOM FOR ANOTHER FUNCTION (SEE BELOW). I'd rather slow motion be on the stop button, but Carlos couldn't make that work.
Thumbs down & thumbs up --- Put on Red & Green buttons on C4 (red = thumbs down; green = thumbs up) DONE
TiVo button -- map to MENU on C4 remote
Chapter ff and rw - chapter/track advance buttons - On the Harmony Remote these buttons are called skip back and skip forward. In harmony's software interpretation of TiVo commands it is referred to as Replay and Advance.
Cancel and Enter commands for TiVo need dedicated buttons - we could use star (*) and number (#) for those. I am open to other ideas. Maybe the CNCL button can suffice for one of them.
Motorolla
Tuner Swap (called "swap" on Mediacom remote) - Map to same button we use for Live TV on TiVo
List -- YELLOW BUTTON DONE
Favorite -- GREEN BUTTON DONE
Also need the skip forward and skip back mapped to the same buttons we use for TiVo
There are "day" up and down buttons on this remote, which presumably makes finding shows more efficient. Not sure how important it is, but we may want to map those somewhere as well. If we do then we'll probably want them on the Red and Green buttons, which means we need to move the Favorite command over to the Blue button.
Not sure how much of this you can do ahead of time, but I'm happy to make arrangements to be at the house if you want to do it there.
Let me know your schedule when you get a chance.
Thanks,
David
...and I realized a few hours after I sent this I forgot a few things...
No comments:
Post a Comment