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The whole "universal remote" thing seems like laziness to me, because e.g. Pioneer did this very well in their home theatre systems - the AV receiver obviously is the centerpiece of the system, so why would you need more than the touch-screen remote for that?

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My receiver doesn't know how to turn on the TV.

you sure? anynet+/hdmi-cec has been around since quite some time, most people just don't know about it as it's usually poorly documented and buried in not so user-friendly config menus.

> anynet+/hdmi-cec

Sometimes it doesn’t work due to manufacturer bugs. I have a TV that has a bug in their implementation on a specific series of theirs where it won’t turn on/off the TV, but volume does work via HDMI. From doing extensive research I’m not alone.

Yup, XBox does this too.

TIL

Most AV equipment these days supports HDMI-CEC, which does allow you to do that kind of thing.

That being said, Sony just released an update to tons of their devices that fixes a bug where this functionality never really worked. The standards are moet certainly there, but getting manufacturers to implement them well can be quite the challenge.

Especially once that you've got used to proprietary bluetooth remotes, having to aim infrared things is so painful..

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