I’ve had a “Home Theater” system since it was nothing more than my TV hooked in to my amplifier and producing stereo sound. Now, I have 3 Home Theater’s in my house and I use programmable remotes to control them because using the remotes that come with the components mean too darn many remotes.
Early on, I tried many different remotes but I eventually settled on Philips Pronto remote. Their first version was just that – a first version but it was great in that time frame. I upgraded to the Pronto NG (TSU3000) when that came out and have (actually had but more on that in a minute) 2 for my home (I use one in my Family Room, and one in my bedroom – I’d love to have one in my gym but currently don’t). I’ve got a lot invested in it. Programming the Pronto takes a bunch of work though Remote Central has been a great help. You can check out a version of the setup in my downloads.
Well, when I was updating my setup for the HD-DVD players that I just got (see other posts) I had an issue. The setup went great. I’ve gotten very good at programming these remotes so I rarely have problems with that. Anyway, when I went to synch the remote up with the new setup the remote crashed. I tried re-updating the firmware. The remote just bricked. I’m pretty proficient with technology and I tried quite a lot (searched the web to make sure I wasn’t missing things) but it was dead.
After some investigation, I’ve made an educated guess that Parallels on my Mac Pro under Leopard OS X 10.5.1 is what caused the problem. I repeated everything on a Vista machine on my second remote and all went great and the remote works fine. I even tried to use Vista to see if there was anything to do with the bricked remote but alas it’s still dead
I’ve ordered 2 replacement Pronto NG’s via ebay (which are at a good price) and unfortunately, I’ll have to use the Vista system (Kathy’s system) to program the remotes in the future which is sad.
There are some really interesting remotes coming from Philips in their Pronto line this next year as the Pronto NG is being discontinued. I’ve tried the Logitech line of programmable remotes but find that their wizard based programming model is just too limiting for advanced programming and limiting (though it does work for many uses – I gave mine to my parents).