The movie Robots has “special content” for your X-Box. Unfortunatly, some of us use our X-Box for a DVD player.
Let me tell you it is A BITCH to get to the fucking movie! Put in your DVD and it will automatically default to the ‘special content.’ I should put in directions, once I fucking gave up and watched something else after trying to get the movie to play for 10 minutes.
The store I work at sells a giant, pink, heart-shaped Universal remote that I am considering buying for Grandma because the buttons are hard plastic and easy to mash, and there are so few buttons…she can’t read the tiny print on her remote and never uses 90% of the functions anyways.
I spent an entire week housesitting for Lilith Fair recently, and I had to stop by a day early to get a training course on How To Turn The TV On. I took notes, drew charts, made up cute names for the remotes…the four remotes…and still me and an engineer managed to screw things up so that there was no sound when the TV was playing, only when a DVD was playing. There were, thank goodness, actual buttons on the various cable boxes, Dvd players, VCR’s…but you had to lay on the floor to find them and needed a flashlight and a magnifying glass to read them.
I can’t turn on th TV at my daughter’s house at all. I feel so old.
Can I just say, a-fucking-men? We dealt with this problem constantly at university at our weekly anime club, since we held it in one of the school common rooms. There were weeks I was tempted to skip using the TV rooms entirely and start jury-rigging the AV equipment in a classroom instead (technically, we weren’t allowed, but the only thing needed to bypass that was a PS2).
Yeah, noticed that and missed the edit window. The fast forward, rewind, play and stop all look like one button.
Universal remotes can be had for less than $10, found in most any Target/Wal-Mart sort of place.
In my professional experience, they don’t work and are a complete waste of money, unless you want to throw down $70-odd on a Logitech Harmony or something that’s way too advanced for 95% of the people out there.
We have a supposed universal remote, which came with the new cable package–it’s got buttons on it for the DVD player (and other things as well)–but it has never worked for the Nintendo or the DVD player-something about them not being channel 3. I really am too impatient to bother with the effing thing. We are due to get a new TV soon, perhaps then. If not, my MacBook plays movies just fine.
Colophon–I swear the makers add that sort of stuff for their own amusement–they probably think, “hey, at least we can put on a show before the consumer hurls the remote in a fit of pique!” :rolleyes: 
In my opinion, the most reliable electronic appliances are the ones with faux-wood trim on them. I’ve got vintage gear that has held up longer than the modern crap with the cheap looking silver-gray plastic all over it, and I like a piece of equipment to have some nice solid weight to it, as well. But I’m just an old-fashioned crank.
I wasn’t clear in my last post. We have a universal remote for the cable. We had a separate remote for the DVD player. The GameCube has never worked on any remote we’ve ever had. We’ve lost the DVD one. <sigh>
That’s what we thought. We have a cheap-ass Ilo television (Wal-Mart’s house brand), and you can’t switch between TV and AV without the remote. We lost the remote for a couple of weeks and couldn’t watch DVDs. We bought a universal remote, and it didn’t work with Ilo brand, even though it said it did and gave instructions for how to set it up for Ilo. Fucking fuckity fuck. At least we finally found the original remote.