Harmony Hub & Remote - is it worth it?
I've read a lot of reviews about the Harmony remotes and they are all over the place. I've seen people saying to avoid completely as it's slow and buggy, I've seen people say it works perfectly. Is there a reason for the variations? It seems to be one of the best solutions for controlling the entire entertainment area (and smart devices elsewhere) assuming it actually works.
Anyone with some first hand experience?
Edit: Wow thanks for all the replies everyone! This is far more first hand impressions than I was getting by searching. Based on the positives I think I'll give it a go once I've got my room all set up. I'm no stranger to troubleshooting and tinkering so I think it should go fine, key is getting it set up well enough the wife doesn't hate it. Thanks again!
Posted Feb 28, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC · edited
I have three Harmony Elites on 3 relatively different systems and the worst problem I have ever had is the one of the PS4s lost BT pairing.
The responsiveness isn't as fast as a normal IR remote since you are essentially sending a RF signal from the remote to the hub that then sends out either IR or BT commands.
There are people that do not like them but I would chalk that up to them improperly configuring their remote or they have a defective one.
Wait, the Elite can control the PS4? How does that work? I have a pretty old 650 model and the setup program says it can't control the PS4 which would have been nice although not really a priority anymore.
It pairs via BT as a "keyboard" and you get all the face buttons, navigation etc.
Sony are boneheads and don't allow the PS4 to be woken up by anything but the controller or the face button, nor do they have an IR receiver so you do have to manually power it up. The remote can control it though and when you leave the activity, it will do a series of automated inputs to put it in rest mode.
Easy solution I've found though, is to have ECC on in your AVR and playstation. So when the Harmony switched the AVR to the PS4, it wakes up, then you are good to go.
Unfortunately I already have CEC disabled because it's frustratingly inconsistent and causes issues. The only setup I have where it works right is a simple TV + soundbar + roku
Ah yes, CEC is an option I had totally forgotten about since I disabled it so long ago. My main system is really complex with over 10 devices connected so it never worked reliably for me but worth people trying out to see if it works for them.
That's both cool and dumb at the same time, I wish the PS4 would have just had an IR receiver for the basic play/pause/forward/reverse or whatever for media. I hate using the controller for that.
I have mine properly setup and I prefer using regular remotes with hdmi-cec. I know cec isnt the best and can be annoying sometimes, like when my nvidia shield wants to fight my computer to display on the tv. But I prefer the responsiveness to the little bit easier use.
That's the great thing about the remote, you can go the CEC route, direct IR, BT, and IP control, so there is a lot of flexibility.
In my setups with CEC, all my devices just start yelling at one another for attention.
I can't agree that it's as responsive as the regular remote. On my Denon 4500h, if I press the volume button 5 times to lower it by that value, it goes down instantly. The Logitech remote seems to queue those actions and it'll keep going down long after I finished clicking 5 times.
Also the myharmony software is incredibly annoying to use. Some basic features also lack, or I couldn't find them maybe, like sending a power off command to a certain device when an activity starts. Or keeping devices of a previous activity alive when starting another one.
E.g. I got an activity to start my TV and receiver, and one to start my projector and close window blinds. I'd love to power off only the TV when swapping to the projector, nothing else. Also can't add an activity to start a certain playing device and set the receiver to the correct input, since that will shutdown whatever other devices (TV, projector) I had booted up in a different activity. Pretty clunky overall, you can't even change the order of activities through the software and the goddamn swipe action information keeps showing up on the remotes display - despite already clicking "don't show again" a dozen times at least.
But maybe I just did it wrong, which is also very likely since I only got it two weeks ago.
Which is why I said it isn't as responsive.
You can set power behavior for each individual device in the activity settings.
You can change the order of the activities through the app or directly on the remote.
Oh, my bad, I misread. I'll try to change the power settings then, but I'm pretty sure I tried that and the drop-down menu didn't work/was disabled. I'll give it a shot through the app since that seems to be further developed than the pc application, that one feels like it's stuck in 2002 in terms of design, features and usability. Thanks for the tips.
Yeah the mobile app surpassed the desktop app quite some time ago and by a large margin. I can't remember the last time they updated the Silverlight powered "desktop app".
Try changing the interkey delay. That helps a ton with the responsiveness.
So, I agree on the responsiveness... It's the remote itself having to "wake up". Once awake, it's fine. I have the elite and the regular remote and hub combo, and id buy the regular one again in a heartbeat. The only problem is that I'm the only who remembers what activity button does on the regular remote, so the elite works better in terms of user friendliness.