Last night I spent a couple of hours getting a one button menu working using the cable box display and a remote control. I added a third device that I'm going to use frequently to my entertainment center and I didn't want to get another remote out to change the input on the receiver.

What's a one button menu? It's a menu that I can control using only a single button. There's no additional buttons for anything, not scrolling through the list or selecting items. The way I made it work is a double click brings up the menu, single clicks cycle through the list of choices, and finally a double click chooses the selected item. It was a little tricky because I had to add delays and scheduled events so that it could detect the difference between a single click and a double click, but it works quite well.

Why a one button menu? Because I only had one spare button on my TiVo remote, the TV Power button. All of the other buttons either do something with the TiVo or control the volume on my receiver.

The TV Power button actually wasn't a spare. I had already been using it to turn on/off the receiver and make the receiver switch inputs to the TiVo. But I was doing that with software I wrote so changing it to do something else wasn't hard. The other buttons send IR codes directly to the devices so it would be difficult to really make use of them. Because I made a double click enter the menu, I was able to keep the original functionality: a single push of the TV Power button will still switch the receiver to the TiVo (and power on if necessary), or if the TiVo is already selected it will power things off.

Now I am wondering what kind of menu things I can do using the front panel buttons on my receiver...