Not exactly a hand held, but these Palm Pilot like remote controls are pretty slick. The [link|http://www.remotecentral.com/tsu2000/index.html|Pronto TSU2000] has a 4 greyscale display while the [link|http://www.remotecentral.com/prontopro/index.html|Pronto Pro] has a 256 color display.

The remotes are fully customizable - hit a single "watch DVD" button and a macro runs that will turn on the TV and switch to the DVD video input, turn on the surround sound decoder and switch to the DVD audio input, turn on the DVD and then change the remote's display over to the DVD control panel.

Here's a few [link|http://www.remotecentral.com/prontopro/winapro.htm|examples] of customization from a contest. I like the idea of using channel logos to pick your station(see 3rd image of grand prize winner).

While pricy compared to other "all-in-one" remotes, these can actually make your home theater easy to use(for wife, visiting family, etc) via some macro programming.

[link|http://giantlaser.com/tonto/|The Tonto Project] is an alternative to the Windows only ProntoEdit that's used to program the remote control. It's written in Java so I suspect it can also be made to work under OS/2.

I spent the latter half of last week teaching the ProntoPro how to control my devices. Sunday I started programming it and so far have a main menu with "HDTV" and "TV" on it. Hit "HDTV" and the set & receiver switch to the correct inputs and a new menu pops up with 9 buttons labeled "ABC", "HBO EAST", "PBS", etc. for the 9 HD channels I get via cable. Pressing any of these buttons sends the correct 3 digit channel number to the cable box, followed by an "exit" to shorten the time the cable box's channel info screen is displayed.

I think mom will finally be able to operate my TV when she's visiting :-)

A bit of time was spent tracking down what's known as "discrete codes". Discrete codes let you do in one IR "command" what would normally take multiple commands. For instance my set has 11 difference video sources(DTV, STB, Input-1 thru 4 for composite/svideo, Component 1 & 2, VGA and Antennas A & b). Using the normal remote you have to step through the video sources to go to the one you want(though you can disable unused inputs to limit how many you have to cycle through). The set supports discrete codes that allow you to jump directly to a specific video source. Without discrete codes, there'd be no way to program an "HDTV" button that could switch the inputs to correct input, the remote would have no way of knowing what input was currently active and thus wouldn't know how many times to send a "change input" signal.

For my initial setup I'm just using the generic button graphics. I'll worry about the fancy graphics once I have a better understanding of out to program the remote.