Logitech Closes The Harmony/PS3 Loop

July 6, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Long time readers will know that I am an avid proponent of getting a good universal remote to control your home theater setup. It's a lot better than a basketful of remotes and it's very likely to make a complex setup usable for somebody other than the person who did all the wiring and can say things like "I don't see the confusion. Look, the PS3 is on Component 2 on the video switcher and the audio comes in on the receiver under 'DBS 2'. What's the problem?" and then you get this Penny Arcade cartoon. So anyway, we've had a series of universal remotes for a bajillion years - I wrote a post back in January 2007 when I got my Logitech Harmony 880 remote and it still stands. There's one fly in the ointment. Sony made the ... let's call it "awesome" decision that the PS3 would use Bluetooth for remote controls. Meaning the only remote you could get was Sony and it wouldn't control anything else. Yay. Back last February I discovered that Nyko sold an infrared remote that had a little USB dongle to plug into the PS3. Read more about that here, but the short form is that it was better than nothing but still a flawed operation. As I understand the issue Sony was being buttheaded about licensing any component to use the Bluetooth protocols (at least that is what Logitech said. Sony being arrogant and proprietary? That's unpossible!) Anyway, somebody finally quit playing chicken and Logitech now sells a little gizmo that is an IR receiver and a Bluetooth transmitter. You plug it into the wall, do some simple Bluetooth pairing with the PS3 and hey presto! The Harmony remote can talk to the gizmo (via IR) and the gizmo talks to the PS3 (via Bluetooth). The remote can even turn the PS3 on and off just like a real component. I bought one and it works as advertised. It's a little pricy I suppose, but as things have developed the PS3 has become our primary DVD player as well as Blu-Ray so it is useful to make it work just like everything else. Now the only thing that won't play nice with the Harmony remote is the Wii and nobody cares about that because the Wii has no reasonable video playback use. One drawback to this solution is that gizmo will only work with a Harmony remote (it doesn't come with any remote at all and the Harmony remote gets the codes from the internet software you use to program Harmony gear) so if you wanted to use a Pronto or a Crestron automated system or whatever you'd be out in the cold. In theory if you got ahold of a Harmony remote for a few hours you could teach the commands to any learning IR remote. In my case I have a Harmony already so this works great. I don't foresee wanting something other than Harmony during the PS3 lifecycle and if something odd happens I can always use the "old" Harmony to teach the new hotness what to do.

I don't think Sony gets it yet

August 6, 2008 Timothy Sanders

So I got my first PS3 "trophy" this morning in Pixeljunk Eden and I've played a bit with the Playstation network id. It's still not a good equivalent to Xbox Live and Gamerscore. First off you apparently can't see trophies from the web or anywhere but the PS3 itself. Second off, this silly PSN network ID badge I added to my site doesn't display anything other than an avatar icon and a phrase I set on the PS3. Worse, it doesn't even update when those change unless I got to a web page and click an "update" button. Lastly, trophies without Home is just a text string. Whoopee! No graphic, no score, just a little picture of a bronze trophy and the trophy description. It's hard to imagine this catching on. Seems like if they were going to rip off Xbox (while Xbox was busy ripping off Nintendo), they should have been at least able to rip off the cool bits ....

PS3 and Universal Remotes

February 19, 2008 Timothy Sanders

So now that Toshiba threw in the HD-DVD towel maybe you're thinking, "OK I should get myself a sweet, sweet PS3 and some Blu-Ray discs." But there's a problem and that problem is universal remotes. If you aren't using a universal remote than you're A ) foolish and B ) very likely a bachelor. I talked about my Harmony 880 remote before and there are newer Harmony remotes out there so I might not recommend buying an 880 today, but I really highly recommend the Harmony line. The fly in the ointment is that the PS3 doesn't have an IR receiver. It uses Bluetooth for the Sony remote. The Sony remote works well enough, but once you achieve one remote nirvana having that second around is really irking. I recently found out that Nyko sells a IR dongle and small little remote for the PS3, called the Nyko BluWave ($14 at Amazon). You plug the dongle into an USB port on the PS3 and then teach the remote codes to the Harmony. (I did that last night, but I've since learned today that apparently you can PICK Nyko->BluWave as a device on the Harmony and it will download the codes.) This isn't perfect. There are two minor problems and one fairly big one. The first is that a USB device can't turn on the PS3, so there's no power button on the Nyko remote. (The Sony Bluetooth remote does have a power button.) This isn't huge, it's only an issue if you already had a Blu-Ray disc in the drive and wanted to power it on from the couch, and don't have a controller within arm's reach. The second minor problem is that the Nyko remote doesn't have all the buttons of the Sony remote - it lacks both the 10 key keypad and the colored buttons. I'm not sure this is a problem at all, I've never used those on my PS3. I'm a little worried about the Blue/Red/Yellow/Green buttons because I assume those are for Blu-Ray features and I might want them at some point in the future. The much bigger problem is really annoying. If you have the USB dongle connected to the PS3 and you turn on the PS3 via a wireless controller the dongle apparently becomes controller 1. (The Sony Bluetooth remote somehow manages to always be controller 7.) The controller you just used to turn on the console ends up being controller 2. Most games won't play ball with this. Oddly enough if you turn the controller off and then back on it ends up being controller, but that's an awfully clunky workaround. After some thought my current plan is to leave the dongle sitting by the PS3 and only plug it in when playing a Blu-Ray. Figure I'm up there turning the console on anyway, so it's not a big deal to connect the dongle at that time. Given all that, personally I think it's worth $14 to let my Harmony control disc playback. I can't quite unconditionally recommend the BluWave, but I guess you can weigh the issues listed above versus the issue of having to use two remotes (the horror) to watch movies. Update 2/22/08: I realized today that if you're in a game on the PS3 that you can reassign a controller ID. There's a menu that comes up when you press the PS button. This is where you can turn off the controller or the system, or quit the game and return to the Cross Media Bar (XMB). There's also an option called "Controller Options" and from there you can reassign the controller ID. So now I leave the USB dongle plugged in, but I can grab a controller, start a game and then correct the whole controller 2 thing. Still a pain, but better than having to turn the controller off and on again.

Sony's Rube Goldberg Device

February 15, 2008 Timothy Sanders

So I decided to download the new demo of Patapon for the PSP. This marks the first time I downloaded something for the PSP via the PS3. In the past I've downloaded files on PC or Mac and just put those files on the memory stick, but I figured, hey let's try the PS3. This is a silly process. Here's what you do. 1 ) Download the title via the store. At least you can download in the background now, so you can go play something else while stuff downloads. 2 ) OK, now the title you downloaded (which, mind you is a PSP demo) needs to install onto the PS3. This happens for anything you get from the Playstation Network store - you have to install it to the PS3 before you can use it. It would be nice if this occurred in the background as well, but I suppose I can see how random hard drive and CPU access during gameplay would be bad. 3 ) Now you need to connect the PSP to the PS3. This requires using a USB connection cable, no wireless here, no sir! 4 ) Now you run the program on the PS3 to install the software to the PSP. 5 ) Now you can delete the PS3 installer. 6 ) Now you think you're done, but wait! Has it been more than a week since the last time you upgraded the PSP firmware? (I kid Sony, but they do happen about monthly. Put it this way, I bought a new PSP holiday title (Final Fantasy Tactics) and my firmware was *four revs* behind.) 7 ) Turn on the PSP Wifi and check for Network Updates. Log into your network. (You do have your network configured already right? Else it's another whole hoo-hah.) 8 ) Download the update. 9 ) Reboot the PSP and install the update. 10 ) Delete the firmware update from the PSP memory stick. That's it! In just 10 easy steps you've installed a hot new game demo on your PSP!