Pages

Sunday, April 05, 2015

Confusing TV Univeral Remote Control?

Standard Universal Remote
There have been some frequent visitors to my place who have had to use the universal remotes supplied by the cable company. They came with the digital cable boxes. We managed to follow the directions to get these universal remotes to mostly work with the TVs too. This allowed the activation of both the cable box and TV with one press of the button. From what I've seen, it's the traditional, old infrared technology that has been around since I was a kid -- over a decade ago. The three we have look almost identical on the outside with only a few buttons or labels different.

Huh? What's going on?
If I didn't have TVs that chimed a sound when they were turned on and off, I would probably still be none the wiser at the habits of others. Hearing the chime play about five times within a 20 seconds kind of says that there's a problem though -- the record might be seven times in a row. Even worse, at least two of the people I know have still been doing it years later.

My impression is that they managed to turn either the cable box or television on or off but not both. This leads to trying over and over again to get both things to turn on or off. However, because the remote's been set up to turn both the TV and cable box on with one click, it's more difficult. It's not an issue with the TV because the remote seems to allow switching over to just turn on the TV. That doesn't seem to be the case with the cable box. Pressing the power button to turn the cable box on sends a signal to both the box and the TV sequentially with how we set it up.

I learned to start blocking the second signal a while ago...

No comments:

Post a Comment