So…this is very tangentially related to Self Hosting, but hear me out…
We travel frequently, either for work or leisure. As a self-hoster, I always bring an Nvidia shield player on my travel bag, to connect to my Jellyfin host from whichever hotel we might be staying at, to watch at night for example.
But increasingly, this is becoming a pain in the butt. As most TVs aren’t directly hooked anymore to just the antenna or the hotel’s connection. No, they usually will be hooked to an Android box handling all sorts of crap, from the hotel welcoming screens to some info, to their pre-set channels. And the android remote works via HDMI-ARC to control the TV, of which they usually hide the damn OEM remote. So, if you unplug their android box to hook up your own player, you lose the TV controls. In some cases (Sony, mostly) you might be in luck finding the 3 physical buttons they include somewhere on the TV itself to navigate inputs and volume. But in some others, you might as well end up stuck in an Android app menu where you can’t get out (I’m looking at you Phillips). So I think my next addition would be to get an universal remote to sort all these quirks when traveling. Anyone else went through these considerations? Any recommendations?
perhaps something like a Sofabaton U2 would do well for you? you can put in a device preset for the shield and for your home devices plus anything else you need, but also pull a codeset for the hotel TV and swap it out as needed from their app when travelling. you rarely need exact model number matches, usually just something from the right era from the right manufacturer gets you all the commands you need. Add a Flirc USB to use IR on the shield with more control (or on shields without built in IR), you can use any IR codes then, and map keyboard macros and such, or use the sofabatons built in Bluetooth support for a native remote.
Nothing selfhostable in that regard, and most of the solutions that do exist are either terribly tedious, or rely on chinese server at some point.
Outside of that, i’m playing with an Astrion remote at home at the moment, which also uses Chinese servers, but you can block all of that and connect it directly to home assistant. it’s far from perfect and a lot of features are still in the development timeline, but they are keeping their word so far with version drops, and the majority of the code is public on their github. Hardly an option for travelling with though.
Thanks. I’ve been looking to a proper remote to carry the torch of the Logitech Harmony. This seems like a great package
The sofabatons are imperfect, but they’re as close to harmony as you will get
I checked some reviews to see how they operate. It looks like the main difference is that the Sofabaton does not have “activities” where the remote keeps track of the state of a device. That is a bit of a shame, but other than that is seems like a pretty close match.
The U2, which is the one that is portable, I.e. no base station, doesn’t have activities, but you can fudge activity behaviour with macros. Its handy to just throw some codes onto it from the app and go.
The x1s and X do have activities but they are more expensive and need a base station.
I’d love it if they’d release a base station-less version with activity capability. I see no reason why that wouldn’t be possible (other than potentially cannibalising their own sales with a cheaper and similarly capable model)
that’s what the U3 is supposed to be, but I haven’t played with that newer one to know if its any good. I think its still not a full activity thing with power and input state tracking, but just a more advanced macro based system.
Would work for 90% of people though,
From the reviews I saw the U3 really only has macros.
In my opinion the activities are necessary for it to be a full-fledged Harmony replacement.