I finally spent some time getting my remote set up and it’s working well enough that I’m trying to go R2-only. The biggest piece was the community integration contributions for Kodi, my LG TV, and wake-on-lan. Now everything is native and doesn’t rely on HA.
Two things that were really irritating during activity UI configuration:
I really wish that I could click on the buttons on the on-screen remote and have it zoom to the configuration for that button. It seems entirely natural to want to say “I want to decide what goes on this button” vs. looking for it in the list. There’s already a “reverse” correlation where the buttons on the on-screen remote are highlighted, so we just need the opposite as well.
Related to the above, the blue and green buttons in the on-screen remote aren’t really blue or green enough to be clear which is which. I found myself having to hover over the blue and green entries in the list to make sure I knew which one I was configuring. Again, being able to simply click on the button I want to change would be clearer.
Often when I select a function for a button, it jumps to the top of the list of buttons and I lose my place in the list. It’s tedious to keep scrolling back down and remembering what the last button that I changed. It doesn’t always happen for some reason, but I just started populating a new activity and when I click on a button to change, search for a command in the list, and select it, it jumps back to the top of the button list. Very annoying.
Of course, another row of buttons would be much appreciated. menu, info, stop, guide all deserve hard buttons to avoid overloading the colored buttons or resorting to buttons on the screen.
Hi,
just an idea. For channel switching I use the directon button so channel up/down are not needed. I set channel up to info and channel down to guide. Because stop is similar to pause I put it on long pause.
The home button could be pressed unintentional and leaves the current App so menu on home button and home on long home button might be easy to remember.
This is just more overloading, though. I’m often already using the channel up/down buttons, and I keep finding myself trying to remember which other unrelated button I might have assigned a common function to, even when trying to program all activities to be consistent.
Also, anyone not involved in the programming will have no idea what random mappings have been made.
Principle of Least Astonishment:
…a component of a system should behave in a way that most users will expect it to behave, and therefore not astonish or surprise users
Hi,
and long Forwards/Rewind could be used for Skip operations when playing movies with chapters.
The design of a remote is always difficult. I know people which use the “STUDIOCONTROL C200” which is more or less a smart phone without any button. Other like the companion of Logitech. One has to find a compromize and I think UC did a good job. It has more button than most other remotes with a large display.
I’ve gotten used to other media players where “back” is enough to stop a video and go back to the list, so I often hit “back” in Kodi and then get annoyed that it’s still playing in the background. I literally never want that behavior with a video, so I wonder if there’s an option to change that.
Amusingly, when I typed “kodi stop” it autocompleted to “kodi stop video playing in background” . It looks like there are some options by modifying the keymap. This one goes back and forth with people arguing over the behavior, but has some hints on what to do: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=324631
. It looks like there are some options by modifying the keymap. This one goes back and forth with people arguing over the behavior, but has some hints on what to do: