Help me pick a remote, please!

If you have an ipad, iphone or itouch you should really look at irule. Fits your budget nicely and does what you want. I use it with my ipad and iphone.

Well for me, I like the overall experience so much that I am fine with not being able to quickly hit a button. I mostly use mine for watching football and I'm always actively on my ipad doing something. All my devices are out of sight and things work nicely. Is it as convenient as just picking up a remote and hitting a button? No, but for me I am very happy with a low cost solution (assuming you already have an IOS device laying around) that has so much power and flexibility.

I would spend a little time in the iRule forum. Another one is demopad which I am now looking into.

Did you ever find a good solution for WMC/MCE? I also primarily use WMC for TV recording and watching, similar to how others use TIVO or any other DVR. Even live TV comes through the HTPC. I currently use a URC learning remote for the Audio/TV while an HP HTPC remote controls the WMC (green button and all). My URC is a bottom of the line model, no LCD screen or otherwise, and works great learning from the original device remote. Problem is I constantly find myself swapping remotes back and forth since I can't control my volume from the HTPC remote (has no affect on volume level with-in WMC for some reason even though display says otherwise).

Anyway, the other night I decided to try adding my HTPC controls to the URC via learning mode. It worked well (not perfect by any means) until I ran out of memory in the URC. Problem is I have to remember what each button does as some are labeled oddly for HTPC control. I also don't have full capability since I ran out of memory. Finally, the transport functions work, but not 100% of the time. For some reason the Skip buttons are flaky. Same with the Play button. Everything else seems to be fine.

This proved that if I found the right learning remote, I could learn everything HTPC related to it. I'm currently considering the R40 and MX-780. The LCD screen would help in adding more functionality, along with the bigger memory. The button labels are still not 1:1 with the HP HTPC remote, but they should be okay and usable. Maybe you found a better solution though? I'd love to have an R40 style remote with DEDICATED HTPC WMC hard buttons. Doesn't seem like anyone makes a remote like that though. Heck, a service that offered custom button layouts (replaceable rubber pads) for an existing remote would be a great solution too.

Hmm... WMC/MCE has worked perfectly fine with every universal I've ever used, including JP1, Harmony, Xsight, URC and iPhone/iPad based solutions. Not sure why MCE has to be treated differently from any other device. If you have to resort to learning, anything but those super-cheap generic MCE remotes are easily learnable, but you do risk running out of memory on a low end remote. I've never had to resort to learning myself for MCE aside from just a few commands, nor have I ever even used the any of my MCE remotes outside of the initial setup. All my remotes had most MCE commands built in.

Well, maybe I've been approaching this wrong, which is entirely possible. Is there a code that everyone is using for WMC? I haven't looked for one assuming that I had to use the Learn feature to get the controls into the remote. It might be better to entire a code and get the basic functionality in, and learn from there. When I say code, I mean a device code that can be entered into the remote directly, not via a JP1 cable or online software. Any help is greatly appreciated!