Need help choosing a universal remote!

The full question is: what do you want this remote to do? Are you the only one using this remote, or does it need to be "family friendly"?

I have found the Harmony remotes to be the best value for the money. They are "activity based" meaning they will have a button to push for "Watch TV", Watch DVD", whatever you want. At first they may seem expensive, but the ease of use is well worth it.

You can get a lower tier Harmony for about $50.00.

Other than that check out some of the Philips remotes, they are close to an activity based remote.

I paid $150 for my Logitech Harmony One. It can be activity based but can also control each individual component afterwards. You can also fully customize what functions of the components remote you want displayed and the order to display them. My AV receiver has 4 pages of functions (what a remote button does) with 6 functions on each one. I put the most common ones on the first page. When I want to watch a bluray, I just hit watch movie and it turns on the AV receiver, TV, and bluray player. You can program the order in which it turns the components on and how long to wait in between. I have a bit longer delay built into the time between turning on the TV and the other components because the tv wont let you change inputs until its done its warmup thing.

Get your answers from the horse's mouth:

http://www.logitech.com/en-us/universal-remotes

See, especially, the "Look up your devices" link.

Plenty of Harmony threads here. The One is probably overkill for you; the currently available 650 would probably be fine.

One word of warning: Logitech is looking to sell the Harmony division, so some are nervous about support in the future.

You should just get a Harmony 650. It does everything that the super expensive Harmony One does. The 650 will not control as many devices but that doesnt matter because you dont have that many. Also the Harmony One is rechargeable and the 650 is not. But you can buy a boatload of batteries with the money you save not getting the overpriced Harmony One.

I was typing my post at the same time.

I agree that the 650 will do absolutely everything you want and more! You can customize "Activities" for the little things as well. For example, my "Watch DVD" activity adds the function of automatically opening the Blu Ray player tray (for the family simplicity) You can further customize to change TV picture settings/formats as well as audio.

Further, the "HELP" button is a blessing for the family, as once in a while they a component may not turn on, or set to the right input, etc. and the remote will walk the user through everything to correct the issue.

Let me tell you, the Harmony remotes are a blessing for full family use! I am very experienced in progamming remotes, set up etc., but I got very tired of being called by the family when they wanted to watch a DVD, or movie, or CD. They are all so proud of themselves that they just push a button and everything works perfectly. As a further hint, you might "trial" the activities to "error proof" switching from one to another. I have adjusted the activities so that anyone can go from any activity to any other one with no glitches. (i.e. the family can turn on "Watch TV", then decide to watch a DVD. They simply press "Watch DVD" while watching TV and everything switches perfectly.)

As stated earlier, you can customize the buttons within an activity to include any, and all, the individual remote functions.

Lastly, be warned that you may get spoiled by these remotes. I started with one Harmony 659 (lower end model), and ended up with four more 880s for all the other rooms in the house!

There's also a lot of help available here under "Harmony."

Which is nice, since the web interface is daunting.

Extremely powerful, but daunting.

It's a learning remote, so you can just "teach" it that button. You'll need both remotes. Just follow the on-screen instructions.

No need to learn anything. DVR = LIST in the harmony database. Kind of obvious to me, but that seems to throw a lot of people for a loop. It's a very common question in the logitech forums.

Even better!

As a note, with the Harmony remotes, you can change the name of the button/command. If you want to call it "DVR", you can simply type that into the spot called "LIST".