[OT] HDTV recommendations?

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 07:21:55PM -0400, Scott Allen wrote:
>> So how many TV marketing brochures or technical specifications have
>> you seen that say:
>> "Includes additional IR codes for discrete control of power, inputs
>> and other functions, for use with other company's remotes"?
>> The TV manufacturer doesn't make any money on the sale of these remotes.
>
> Well I know that I will be looking for this in the future.  Any that
> don't will simply be off the list of things to choose from.

We can infer, from this distinction, that vendors that don't include
"integration" as part of their products will be relatively
uninterested in this sort of interoperability.

Vendors that hope to sell multiple components to their customers are
more likely to care.  Sadly there lies a temptation, in such a case,
to have the integration protocol be proprietary.  They'd market this
via "this allows us to serve our customers better."

>> Harmony is doing a pretty good job of handling menus and other
>> multi-key sequences to switch things, so it's not like most of these
>> TVs can't be made to work at all with a Harmony.
>
> They just don't work very well and can often get messed up and out
> of sync.  Gets rather annoying.

In effect, some of the wrong sorts of ergonomic engineering have been done.

The designs of remote controls have been "successful enough," by
virtue of depending on the human observer, whom they rightly expect to
be present, and observant.  But the "open loop" control form makes it
nearly impossible to create more automated controls.

>> I doubt that many marketing departments feel that they are loosing
>> market share because of it. Believe me, if they thought that adding
>> discrete codes would increase market share enough to justify it, they
>> would. Otherwise, as you say, they deserve to loose market share for
>> not recognising this fact.
>
> Well I am hoping that as harmony remotes and such gain in popularity
> perhaps they will start to hear such complaints.

Perhaps...  It would bite them rather more directly if the intelligent
controllers are occasionally being sold by the same companies that
make the devices being controlled.

> And actually I am discovering that they are getting such complaints:
> http://community.insigniaproducts.com/t5/Televisions/Discrete-IR-Codes/td-p/4239

That's encouraging.

> Well if everyone just quietly grumbles about it to themselves, they will
> never fix it.

Another form of "open loop" :-).
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