HTF REVIEW: Harmony 880 Remote

I am loving mine! I replaced a pronto with this remote and wife is very happy indeed. The activity-based setup really makes sense to her! To top it all off it only took me about 30 minutes to config everything! Take that pronto!

Lance

I gotta get me one of these!

Ron, I have a functionality question.

My TV is a 1st gen Toshiba widescreen which does not have an autodetect for the picture size. I have to manually change from 4:3 to Letterbox to fullscreen 16x9 (animorphic mode). If I were to set a macro to turn on the DVD player, receiver, tv, etc... would I be able to set up the macro function to also switch to the correct viewing mode for the DVD?

You should be able to, Clinton. I have a Harmony 659, and after all your equipment is dialed in, you have the option to add additional commands during the startup sequence (ie. pressing "Watch a DVD") or to add commands to the LCD display buttons (ie. one of the programmable buttons besides the display can be used to switch Subtitles or change aspect ratio - although I think you need to select the TV device first).

I dove in! Picking mine up at BB tomorrow. They do have them on-line now. I was able to use some coupon for on-line purchases that they were handing-out at the store the other day. It saves you $10 for every $100 you spend on-line, up to $50. So, I saved $20 for a price of $229.

I've found that the Harmony configuration sometimes makes too many assumptions.

I have a very simple (albeit unusual) system consisting of an HDTV tuner, a receiver, and a cd player (DVDs are played through a computer). The tuner is hooked up to a RGB monitor--no remote, no fancy tuner. When the HDTV tuner turns on, the monitor wakes; when it turns off, the monitor sleeps.

Anyway, I had it configured to my liking, but started to wonder why the TV listings weren't coming up when I pressed the "Media" button. It turned out that the remote thought I was using a Satellite Radio activity.

When I tried to set up a "Watch TV" activity, the setup service balked (as I "coud not" display video (lacking a TV, or monitor). So, it's off to set up my monitor. And for that, it wants a remote. It took me a bit of fiddling to persuade the web site that no remote was necessary, nor required. I should have taken notes, as I can't quite recall how I might duplicate my results.

For my next trick, I plan to get a remote receiver for my iBook, and see if I can't set up the Harmony 659 to play DVDs on the laptop. But initial explorations are not encouraging--the website seems not to believe that a simple computer could play anything as sophisticated as a DVD.

On the other hand, it is nice to be able to toss my remote collection in the drawer-- and the ability to customize buttons using pull down menus instead of fiddly numeric codes is a godsend.

My devices came with two "universal remotes." The one that came with my HDTV tuner didn't support receivers, an unusual choice, as HDTV should mostly appeal to the "home theater crowd", and the other didn't support HDTV tuners, and neglected third party CD players. The Harmony, however, could recognize my HDTV tuner, CD player, and receiver, with a minimum of fuss, although setting up activities proved to be rather confusing.

Good review, Ron.

But we gotta get you a screen capture utility so you don't have to take photographs of your monitor.



PS -- Glad you're liking the Harmony. As I mentioned previously, my satisfaction level has increased the more I've used mine.

Thanks Ron,

Your positive review helped me pull the trigger on the 688. Can’t wait to finish the assembly of my basement HT and put this bad boy in charge!

Nice review, Ron.

Glad to see it's been all you expected, and that I could steer you to one of the best HT accessories on the market today, IMO.

For those of you not yet using a Harmony, if you have HDTV via cable, the remote that comes with the HDTV/PVR in many cases does NOT have the 30-sec. skip button, nor is it even programmable into the OEM remote (I gotta believe this is a bone thrown to major advertisers by the cable company and Motorola - the maker of the HDTV/PVR tuner/recorder).

Harmony DOES have the 30-sec. skip button in the online database for the Motorola 6412 and all its 600 series remotes - a godsend if you watch NFL football (only no-huddle offenses aren't perfectly in synch with a 30-sec. skip, to watch games with minimum "dead time" between plays).

One other cool Harmony feature I forgot to mention, if you have a CD or DVD jukebox. There's a media button on the Harmony 688 (probably a similar function on the new 880 and other 600 series). You enter your CDs by title and artist online, by the slot they occupy in the jukebox.

Now to play any CD, you don't need to know what slot it's in, or refer to an index or a list somewhere. All you have to do is hit "media" and an alphabet grouping comes up - press the apprpriate alphabet button for that artist, and all album titles under that artist show up - now press the album you want, and you're done. Very slick and easy.

Yes, there's a media button on the 659. In "Watch TV" mode, it displays TV listings. Radio listings would be nice, but as far as I can tell, that's not an option. Pity.

I agree with what Ron says about the charger base. I feel like I need to rubber-band it. It's difficult to keep the contacts touching. BTW, how long does it take for it to charge-up the first time around? Thanks.

Other people have complained about the charger, I have never had a problem. Do you have it on a hard flat surface?

I just drop mine in, press the glow button, and it is alwasy fully charged.

What about memory? I've been using my Marantz RC2000 MKII for years and I've gotten to a point where it's pretty full and has a hard time learning any more functions. How much memory does the 880 have compared to my old Marantz?

All of the current harmony remotes have 2MB of flash.

Does that not seem kind of low? I mean, I've read above about the CD jukebox option and it sounds wonderful to me except wouldn't that take a big chunk of memory just to hold all of my 400 CDs' titles and such in there as well as all the other remotes I have installed? Just wondering

How many bytes does it take to store a disc title? I don't have a jukebox, so I'll just snag a example from my TV listings.

"Great Performances" is 18 bytes, and occupies the whole of the screen.

log2(400) = 8.6439 bits.

So, that's another 2 bytes.

20 bytes*400= 8K.

Of curse, that's assuming that the jukebox doesn't support track titles. It may. 99 tracks of 18 bytes each plus an index would balloon each record to

20 bytes+ 99*(18+1)= 1901 bytes*400 =743 K. Hmm. Not much room for 14 days (672 half hours) of 500 channels.

Just picked up my 880 last night and she's all charged up and ready too go. One question I have, do you guys hear a rattle inside the remote if you shake it from side too side? I noticed the remote senses movement to turn on the LCD/glow and was wondering if had something to do with the noise?

Kevin

Please take back everything I said above about this remote. I picked mine up yesterday and this thing is freaking awesome. At first I thought it was a pretty low level learner. I inputted all the equipment I had into the website and it downloaded all the information onto the remote. Within about ten minutes I was up and running. Fantastic...but! It also downloaded allot of buttons I had no use whatsoever. I thought, "This is crap! I don't want a button named BLUE or YELLOW or a bunch of other things I had no need for" Plus it just sort of spread everything around all over the place on the LCD screen pages.

Then I got into actually customizing each device and activity. Then this thing really started to blow me away. It's so much more customizable than my Marantz RC2000 MKII ever was. I'll keep you all updated with what I find. So far though, I'm one happy dude. One thing though, I own a new Starchoice DSR 530 HD receiver with a built in HD. This isn't on the list of available devices. Anyone have any idea how long it takes to get these new devices onto the site?

Well, I have discovered one problem concerning the CD Jukebox Media listings. Hopefully someone can help me out with this.

I went through and loaded all of my 400 CD's into the logitech website (took me a few HOURS!). I include the Artist and then Album Name exactly as instructed. Everything looked great on the screen so I proceeded to download the information to my remote.

Now when I activate the CD Jukebox activity and then hit media it asks me to choose my artist based on A-G, H-N etc.

When I choose one of these, it lists a mixture of some Artist names and some album titles. It appears to be a big mess! Has anyone else had this problem?? At times it WILL list an Artist and if I click on it, it will show all of the albums by him. The list shows correct for about 10% of the CD's I entered.

I cannot seem to find ANY information on the internet about this. I also tried re-downloading the info to my remote, thinking the data might have become corrupt somehow, but it is still a mess.

Any help would be great!

Thanks All!

Richard

Richard-
best help I can offer is you should call Harmony's tech help (the phone number is in the manual with the Harmony box). They're very responsive and knowledgable, in my experience.

If you have a corrupted database, they should be able to tell you. Hopefully, they can salvage all that effort you put into inputting your CDs.

Well, I'm still having the problem with my CD listing under the "media" section. It's not a huge deal but I'd like it if it worked as it said it should. I'm sure when I call them tomorrow, they'll help me out. The other small thing I would add is though the original set up is very quick, actually customizing the remote is quite a job. Not unlike any other learner remote. You'll find yourself running back and forth to your computer yelling "SHIT! I forgot to add...." Well at least I did.

Also, the other thing I found was if you do use the manual learn function to learn a particular button onto the remote, it is not available on other devices if that makes sense. For example. On my HD satellite receiver, I have a button call DVR List which shows what is available on the hard drive. It wasn't available on the list that was given so I learned it myself which worked fine. Thing was, I also wanted it under my TV setting but it wasn't available so i had to re-input it again. i would think if I did it once, it would become part of the drop down arrow for all devices and not just the one I originally learned it to. I'm not sure if this makes sense.

More observations coming....

In order to use the TV Guide feature on the 659, you must plug the remote into your PC and download program listing updates every few days. Considering the way the programs were listed on the LCD screen (they are not easy to read), it wasn't worth the hassle of constantly downloading program updates. I shut the feature off my 659 soon after getting it.

I had to return my first unit to Best Buy, as both the battery and charger had problems. I never could get an answer from support on how long the thing takes to fully charge; so, after two days, I figured there was another problem.
I will agree, though, the setup is easy, and everything worked fine for me, once I had a working unit.
I would like to point-out that since Logitech just took over Harmony, the support structure is still a little weak. I received several e-mails from Logitech informing me that they were closing my problem records and that I would be hearing from Harmony.
Although my configuration is rather simple, I am still a little confused by some "A", "B", "C", and "Effect" buttons that come up in my "Watch TV" mode. I do have Media buttons configured for my Hi-Def channels.
This remote has great potential. I feel that I have only scratched the surface.

Well, I did get in touch with Logitech today. I found the support to be great!

First they took my username and loaded it into their system. He confirmed that I did indeed enter the CD listings on the Logitech website correctly (I don't think anyone COULD go wrong doing this, it's just Artist Names and Album Names)..

...Anyhow, they were then able to load all of my settings and devices into their "virtual remote". He confirmed that the CD listings were indeed messed up and said it was definitely a bug with the remote.

The issue will be logged today, reviewed tomorrow and then put into a cue of known issues. He did warn me that my bug was not "critical" so not to expect a fix in a day or two.

Oh well, at least they have now confirmed this as a bug.

Just thought I'd let you all know the outcome.

Richard