Replace ALL YOUR REMOTES with the Sofabaton X1S! Step-by-Step Guide

[Music] we finally have a solution to replacing all of these remotes with a single remote well almost today we're going to be looking at the sofa baton x1s remote I reviewed the X1 couple years ago honestly I was not really impressed but this guy here they've made a lot of improvements in this video I'm going to walk you through everything I know about this remote but I'll also walk you through step by step on how to set it up config ad devices as well as activities but before we dive into the video I want to give a big thanks to our Platinum Channel sponsor AR andall sound Rendall sound 1723 series offers beautifully crafted speakers with breathtaking Clarity and detail and a host of subwoofers that provide authoritative base whether you're jamming out to your favorite song or action-packed movie The 1723 series guarantees an immersive and exhilarating experience with with a 60-day audition period 1-year upgrade program 10-year warranty and a hassle-free return shipping if you're not satisfied you absolutely have nothing to lose be sure to check out the links for rall sound down in the description below inside the box you'll find the owner's manual the sofa baton x1s remote a quick start guide for basic settings two us BC charging cables one for the remote and one for the Hub a single wired IR repeater plus a dual wired IR repeater now they only include one USBC wall charger and of course the main Hub that will be used to send IR Commands to control your various [Music] components so here we have the Hub we need to connect power so that's one of the USBC connections you're going to need to get your own little power brick because it only comes with one plug that in this will be the IR Blaster so this will be placed inside your cabinet so that it can communicate with your components like here I have my Anthem so it'll send IR commands from this unit to here and I believe the remote connects to the hub via Bluetooth so if you have other items that are further in your cabinet you can use these little IR repeaters so you would take that there's two input in uh inputs right here so we can connect one if you need to connect the other one connect that one as well and that's going to send those IR commands down this Center into this IR repeater and basically the way this works is you'll remove this little tab here and that's just a sticky and then you can place it somewhere close to the IR sensor on the component so that it can reach so let's say in my cabinet I have the IR repeater right here but I also have a unit way down here there's no way that that IR Blaster can reach that far so what we would do is we would connect that cable right there come all the way down to the unit and in this case I don't really have it stuck to the front but you can see it right there so that would send that IR command all the way down to that unit and be able to control it as well [Music] so we're going to head into the sofa baton app I'm going to go ahead and log into my account since I previously reviewed a sofa baton X1 remote all right so here we have the U series or the X series of course this is the X Series we're going to set up a new Hub we already have the Hub connected to a power outlet I'm going press and hold the button on the back of the hub for about 3 seconds and the light is flashing blue so the blue indicator is flashing next and we'll go ahead and allow Bluetooth and there's the Hub so we'll click that we'll go ahead and allow connect to my internet not sure why it says provision but we'll go and click that that's basically accept and it's now connected to my network so now we're going to select the x1s Hub and it is now connected and we'll click save so now we're connected to the hub and we do have an update to the firmware so let's go and update that all right so that only took about a minute and now let's connect back to the hub click save and it's saying there's another update I don't think there's a update but I'm going to go ahead and click update let's update the firmware again now there is the possibility that there are two different firmware and they have to be updated in sequential order so I'm going to give you guys the benefit of the doubt on that and hopefully once we get through with this we can continue on with the installation but this definitely is taking a little bit longer than the other one so maybe that file is a lot larger and it is indeed a different firmware version all right so now we have the firmware updated and we can begin adding our devices so we're going to click the plus sign up here we're going to be using infrared and we're going to search their database so we're going to search for Anthem click that avm70 is right here actually there's an AVM 78k so that's what we're going to use and we're just going to test it power on click the trigger and it does turn it on perfect let that boot up for a second I'm going to hit the power off trigger and it just powered it off so good news is that it is at least those two commands are working so we'll assume the rest of them are we'll test those in a little bit we'll click next and we're going to call this Anthem AV M70 and we can choose an icon I'm going to use this little AVR kind of Icon click complete so it's downloading that all right Perfect all right next we'll add my projector so we'll click search JVC click on that nz8 right there and let's just go and turn it on boom I heard it turn on looking good so far all right the projector just came on so I'm going to hit trigger off hit it again and she is powering down so we are two for two and then we'll use yeah that looks good so we'll use it actually knew that the I icon was a projector so that's pretty cool so we go and download that code base as [Music] well okay the next thing we're going to do is add the Apple TV and we got to do this a little bit different we'll click the Plus at the top right instead of going to infrared we're going to use Bluetooth then we're going to search for Apple click on that and I'm going to use the Apple logo as the icon we'll click complete give that a few seconds Now using the Apple remote we're going to go over here to settings we're going to come down to the remotes and devices click okay and then we're going to scroll down here to Bluetooth and down at the bottom you're going to see other devices and we're going to click on sofa baton and click okay so now that is connected now if you have a projector like in my case I've got a JVC nz8 there's one button for on but to turn the unit off I actually have to hit the power button twice if I hit standby which is the off button if I hit it once it pops up a menu on the screen it says hey are you sure you want to turn this off so you have to hit it again so we need to make one more change in the software in the app to be able to power that down when we hit the off button on the sofa baton remote so we're going to go back to devices we're going to go to JVC and up at the top we're going to click on edit and then we're going to come down here to power settings and so when it's not in use we can tell it to turn off so that's fine we do have separate buttons we have an on and then we have a standby so we're going to click next but here's where we need to make some changes the turn on is fine that's just one tap but if I click next we have turn off sequence so right now it's going to press the off button just once you can see right here it's going to press uh once uh or it's going to press the off button immediately but we need to add another press so I'm going to hit the plus and even before I hit another command I'm going to give it just a little delay so I'm going to say a delay of maybe 1 second hit confirm so it's going to hit the power off button wait one second and then we're hit the plus button again add a command and then we're going to come down here and hit power off again so you can see what it's going to do when I hit the power off button on the sofa baton remote it's going to turn off everything and when it goes to turn off the JVC projector it will press the off button once it'll delay one second kind of pause and then it's going to hit the off button again a second time so I'm going to go ahead and hit complete and we'll test that in just a little bit so there's one other thing we need to do within the sofa baton and that is to tell it how the Apple TV turns on and off the unit so if I press the Apple TV remote button the power button it pops up this menu up here and so to turn the unit off I actually have to hit the okay button to let it know I'm powering off because as you can see we've got some other options here ethernet do not disturb sleep timer audio and so forth the other option is to do a long press so if I were to back up and if I were to press and hold the power button it will then power off the unit so let's jump back over into the sofa baton app and make a change so we're back in the device tab we're going to click on Apple TV 4K and then up at the top right click on edit we're going to come down to the power settings so when the device isn't being used let's say I switch over to the rvolution or Collide Escape we do want the Apple TV to power down so that's fine we're going to turn that off when not in use we'll click next on this page we we actually want this to have two different states so there is only one one button here for power but one button is going to be a single press and then the power off we need it to be a long press so we're actually going to set this button to this second option here it's only a power key but it has different actions and I'll show you why so if we click next the power on sequence is just a single tap it's an immediate tap so that's fine but here's where we need to make the change on the next page the turn off sequence instead of just a single press we want to make that a long press so we're going to click this link that says immediately and then we can scroll down I'm GNA hold it for probably one second we'll try that just to make sure but that should be plenty and we'll click okay and so actually I can test it the unit is on right now I know you guys won't be able to see but I'm going to hit test and let's see what happens and it did power off so that is plenty of time for it to work and now we can hit complete [Music] now when I first added these three activities it was not telling the anthem the avm70 which input to select to for the appropriate uh activity so I'm going to show you how to check that and change that and when I originally set it up I probably didn't do it right so I'm going to back up to devices we're going to go to Anthem and I'm going to click edit at the top right now I'm going to go down to Source configuration at the bottom bottom so whenever I am selecting an activity this device does need to be able to change um inputs so I need to switch the input so I'll go to go to configure so here's where I initially messed up I chose bring up the navigation menu because on the anthem remote we do not have buttons for um HDMI 1 HDMI2 HTMI 3 or uh sometimes they're labeled Blu-ray game and so forth so I was going based on the instructions on here to use the bring up the navigation menu and then you scroll left and right to select that I never could really get that to work consistently so I went back and I used the top one which is the which is what they recommend direct input switching so although my remote control does not actually have separate buttons here this will allow us to go in and manually tell the sofa baton which input we want to use so we're going to select that click next and so here you can see all of the different inputs remember earlier when I mentioned that I ended up using the um Anthem avm70 instead of the 8K on the 8K I did not have input one 2 3 all the way to 30 I only had that top input so it did not give me that ability so if you run into that if you got an Anthem uh use that one you may have to try different ones but the original Anthem avm70 works here so ideally what we need to do is I have three inputs three devices that are plugged in I have one for kid Escape that's HDMI 1 I have Apple TV which is HDMI2 and I have rvolution which is HDMI 3 so now we're just going to select HDMI 1 2 and three because those are the only ones that I'm going to physically need technically you could go ah and add more if you wanted to that way later on if you add items to it uh like plugin let's say a PlayStation 5 then you could do that so we're going to do HTMI one we'll find HDMI 2 there HDMI 3 there actually I'm going to add one more because I do have a PlayStation 5 that I'll be adding to this system later so we'll do four for now and I'll hit confirm so now we basically are going to tell it and here you can see I've already kind of cheated I already have Collide Escape assigned to HDMI 1 Apple TV 4K HDMI 2 rvolution HDMI 3 and so we'll go ahead and put the PlayStation 4 or I'm sorry PlayStation 5 here so we'll do PS5 and that is the input number four and then we'll click complete and complete again so we're going to add one more device because I want to show you something that's pretty interesting I click plus we're going to go back to infrared search the database and I also have have an rvolution right here so you can see rvolution player one now when to click on that notice right below the r we have user shared and so this is actually pretty cool if they don't have a device in their database I'm assuming that if I were to learn let's say for instance if I had you know an Anthem avm70 if they didn't have it in the database I could learn the buttons that I want that would be uploaded to their database and then shared with the community so that's actually pretty cool so we're going to actually use that one and then we're going to click trigger I'm going to take a look over there and see if it powers on and it powers on so we're good to go we'll click next we'll choose an icon and hit complete and that's to go ahead and update to the system now the last thing we need to do before we create our activities activities are kind of like your one push button that triggers a bunch of different things in your components let's say you click watch movie and it turns on my projector it turns on my my processor it turns on the rvolution um and so we need to configure some things now you'll see here Anthem JVC and apple do not have the not configured but originally when I added those items it did say not configured I've just already done that but I want to show you how to do that so we'll click not configured and then up at the top it says before you create this activity you need to look at some things we need to know your power settings and we need to know your Source configuration so we'll click power settings and it says so what state is this device when you switch to an activity that doesn't include it so basically right now we're on our volution but let's say we want to switch over to collide Escape or your 4K player or your PlayStation 5 what do you want to do with the power do you want to turn that unit off um and so to me if I'm switching I don't necessarily need that so I'm going to turn it off in use but at as you can see we got a couple other options we can always leave it on leave it on unless the power off button is pressed or no power switch so we're just going to do no I'm sorry turn off when not in use and then right here it says how does your original remote handle the turning on and off the device and so if I grab the rvolution remote we can see we've got a power button that turns it on and off so it's only one power and it does the same function you hit it once to turn on hit it once to turn it off some devices would have two different buttons like the anthem we've got a power on as well as a power off and so we're just going to use the only a power key is the same action hit next and then we don't really have to add any um delays or anything so we're going to hit complete we could test it but like I said I've already tested it earlier and then up here we've got Source configuration as well so the rvolution does not need to switch any type of inputs so we're going to say no need to switch input and we'll click okay so now we have all of our devices added I'm going to do one thing before we create activities I'm going show you how to tidy up some things up at the top right I'm going to click the edit button and come down here to JVC and click that edit button and then we can come in here and type nz8 click done and submit we'll click back and then we'll also do the same thing top right edit button Apple edit button and we'll call that TV and that way just kind of again I'm just OCD on stuff like [Music] that so now that we've got all of our devices added into the app we're going to add our first activity so down at the bottom we're going to click on activities and then the plus icon at the top right so here you can see sofa baton has already kind of analyzed some of the components that we have and it's given us some options up here for default they're suggesting watch Apple TV maybe watch Collide escape and so forth so if I click on watch Collide Escape it selects the anthem which is my processor the JVC for the projector and the Collide escape and that's exactly what we want if you want to select them manually you would just come over here click customize it clears all of them and then you could select the ones that you want so we'll go ahead and click next so here we need to tell it what input do we need on the avm70 so we'll click select an input so remember earlier in the video where we went in and assigned HDMI 1 or input one to collide Escape input two was Apple TV that's what is pulling in right here so we already have the ability to easily connect those by clicking Collide escape on the JVC we're going to select input one and we'll click next so right now all of my equipment is turned off yes all of it's turned off so we'll just tell it it's all off and click next so on this screen it's asking what is going to control the volume in my case it's the avm70 and then on this screen once that activity has started what do you want these other buttons that are highlighted to to control and in this case we want that to control Collide Escape so we'll use that and click next if you want to rename it to something different besides watch Collide Escape you can do that of course we can choose an icon we'll do the 3D glasses and click complete so I want you to see how quickly uh we can create activities and of course you can get a lot more custom if you've got the ability to control your blinds or things like that or your lights you can go in there and say okay when I hit watch Collide Escape I want you to turn on the projector turn on my AVR set it to this input turn on my Blu-ray player lower my shades and dim my lights if you have that ability so we're going to make two more real quick so we're going to go to let's do watch Apple TV and select an input and that'll be Apple TV input HDMI1 so I did that really quick just to show you how fast we can create uh let's see that's Anthem and that is Apple TV grab the Apple button complete I mean I just created an activity in less than 30 seconds so that's really really quick and I'm really impressed with the app they have really clean this up since two years ago when I first reviewed the original X1 remote and so I'm grateful for that we've got one more activity so I'm going to do custom and we'll do Anthem we'll do JV see we'll do rvolution next grab rvolution HTMI 1 off off off next and that' be Anthem rvolution and then this one we got to type it in watch our volution and we'll grab maybe that one right there so now that we have our three activities what this allows you to do is to make this really easy for you as well as your family I know when my wife comes into the theater room she's really overwhelmed when she's got to you know look through this she has no idea which one controls what what input to select so by putting everything inside the sofa baton building it in the app creating these little macros these activities it's going to make it really easy for you and your family to be able to enjoy your system so we'll just go ahead and test it out I'm going to click watch Collide Escape so Collide Escape came on the anthem just came on and the projector is powering up right now if I click back and I'm going to let this boot up while I'm talking but if we were to click watch Apple TV we've told it to turn off the Collide Escape leave the projector on and then then switch the input on the anthem avm70 over to Apple TV and so actually we can go ahead and do that now because it won't interfere with the projector so I'll hit watch Apple TV and on the anthem it just selected Apple TV and the Apple TV just powered on and so this thing is working extremely well I've had an opportunity to test this I've even deleted all these and readded them just for the sake of making this video so far it's been working really really well haven't had really any hiccups in the activities the hardest part for me was assigning those HDMI inputs and hopefully this video walks you through on how to make that really easy it just took me a little while to figure out what was the best way for the anthem now before we actually look at the remote itself I want to take you to one other location on the app down here at the bottom right we're going to click on me and then we're going to go to share my codebase I figured this out this is actually pretty cool so if you were to learn a or let's say you added a device and it wasn't in their database and that's where you would take your remote and you would have to learn the different functions learn the what is the power on what is the power off what what is the up and down and the left and the right once you learn that then here you can have the option of sharing that with the community and so if I click continue you can see I don't have any devices because everything that I have has already been added to uh the database and so I didn't need that but that's great if you um you know have something like that is a brand new product or maybe it's a not a really well-known product and so they don't have that in their database and so that's great that the community as a whole can help contribute and provide you the consumer with um the commands for that particular device so I thought that was pretty slick so while we're here I'm going to show you something in the settings here's where you would update the firmware for the Hub and you can also update the firmware for your remote if I click on firmware update for the Hub remember earlier we had the two updates that basically is what we were doing I believe we had to update to version one and then we ended up updating to version two and up at the top it says current hub version is two so we know we're up to date so if I click back if I go to Firmware update from remote notice that our current remote version is two but then there's an option it almost seems like there's an option to update to version one so I'm not sure why that's there I would think that it would be like the previous page where we would see each version version one version two and it would let us know at the top which version we're currently on but from what I can see on here we are on the current [Music] version now there are going to be certain instances where you search for a device and it's not included in their database I'm going to show you how you can still utilize the sofa baton remote for your devices that aren't in there so we're going to click the plus choose infrared and at first we're going to search the database for this madvr remote so if I type in mad you can see there's nothing in here that has mad so what we're going to do is click done and down here I it says I can't find the corresponding remote or the brand so I'm going to click there and start learning so this is really just it's a video processor so it really doesn't fit any of these categories so we're going to choose other it only has one power so we'll check that one and hit next so now we're going to pick up this remote and we're going to try to learn it using this Hub so basically what you would do is I would hit to learn point this down and just tap the on button one time but as you can see nothing's happening here so for whatever reason I found there are several remotes that it does not want to learn I tried that with the madvr also tried it with this high sense u7h remote so if I click say for instance the learn the up and I tap and hold the or tap and let go of the up nothing happens but we can take this SVS remote so this is for the soundbase pro and let's say I wanted to memorize this play um pause so I'm going to scroll down here to this play and pause and I'll click learn and watch I'll just hit it one time and let go and you can see it says success and right here you can see it now says trigger and so we could test it to see if that works if we wanted to do another one let's say the mute we could come up here to mute hit learn tap and let go one time and it learns it so for whatever reason not all remotes will be able to be learned inside the sofa baton now when adding a device to the sofab Baton app you might end up finding that some of the buttons do not work properly the good thing is we can actually easily repair those we'll go into let's say the rvolution we'll click on edit at the top right and we're going to go to add repair commands so let's just say the mute button is not working on this so over to the right of mute we're going to see an option that says repair so I can click repair and it says what do you want to do so what we're going to do do is we're going to learn the commands from the original remote you click that and then you would perform that same procedure take the remote point it down towards the Hub and just press that button one time and it will learn that function now while we're talking about devices here's a couple other really cool features that I love about this so let's go say for instance to the JVC nz8 on on devices I'm going to click edit at the top right and down here you'll notice there's an option that says assign commands for remote keys so if I click that here's where you can actually assign any of these buttons on the sofa baton to uh basically be linked to any function that you want so let's say for instance some of these down here the mute button is unassigned right now so if I click unassigned now I can see all of the options from the JVC nz8 projector and I can choose any of these to basically trigger when I click that button and so the cool thing is you can assign the physical buttons to other features within a device so that's super super handy so now I want to show you how you can create what is known as favorite Keys now this is pretty cool so we're going to click on activities up at the top right we'll click the edit button and then let's say we want to edit when we watch Collide Escape so I'm going to click the edit button next to watch Collide escape and the second option down here says Keys favorites so I'm going to click that so here we can either add a macro which is a series of actions or we can just add normal buttons and so I'm going to make it simple let's click on ADD normal keys and what we're going to do is we're going to add under JVC nz8 I'm going to choose a command and I want to add a lens memory one and I'm going to hit confirm and I'll show you what that looks like in just a little bit I'm going to add another normal key and we're going to go to device JVC nz8 command and we're going to choose lens memory 2 and click confirm what lens memory 1 and two it allows me to zoom in the projector and fill my entire screen because it's a 2.35:1 aspect ratio or um I can zoom out to a 16x9 aspect ratio and so what this is going to do is when I'm in the watch Collide Escape activity these will be two buttons within the menu that I can easily get to but that's super cool and again you can create some macros so where this could come in handy is maybe you want to create a button called intermission and so maybe while you're watching a movie you hit pause and when you hit pause then you can reach over and hit a button called intermission and maybe that turns your lights up to a certain percentage or maybe it raises up your Shades to give more light into the room there's definitely a lot of ways that you could use that to be really creative but that is what that is referencing so for now we're just going to leave these two basic uh Keys these normal keys and I'll show you in just a little a little bit what that looks like on the actual remote itself so taking a look at the remote up at the top left we've got our Master off button we have a back button here I'll show you what that's for a battery indicator and then we've got all of our activities and devices here so up at the top we've got our activities we're going to control this section since this is not a touchcreen we're going to need to use this wheel and then we click and now we can see watch Collide Escape that's an activity watch Apple TV or watch our volution then if we click one of those it goes through that sequence of commands to power on say for instance watch Collide escapes would turn on the Collide Escape it would turn on the projector set to the correct input and turn on our Anthem avm70 and set that to its correct input to get back we're going to click this top right button go to devices we can come down and click that and here we can can see each one of our devices and we can scroll up and down and choose any of those options there again to get back back again and then down here we got a few options you can sync the device with the app we can change some settings on how long do you want the screen to stay on so we could set it to 10 seconds and if we lay it down if I can do it that way so you can see it it went to sleep and then when you pick it up it senses that it has been moved we can change that back to 30 seconds and then we can restart the remote if you have any issues with it change the language and update the firmware at least check with the firmware here so we'll back up so once you're in let's say for instance an activity if I click watch Collide Escape here's where we made those changes earlier so once it finishes we're going to see that we have an option if I click it once there's those two memories that we created so that was the additional buttons that you can add in here that can easily get to maybe the commands that you use the most so then we can back up and back up for the most part that's it so these up down left and right do not correspond with this this would be used when you're in an activity so let's say you're watching Collide escape this would control the menu in the Collide Escape these would be the buttons in the Collide escape and remember we set the up and down and the mute to control the avrs volume now of course you can program any of these buttons to do any commands that you want so that is super handy and super helpful but for the most part that's all there is to the remote so far I've been really pleased with the sofa baton x1s if you're interested in picking one up sofa baton is offering a 20% discount using the code youthman I'll leave a link to it down in the description below and once the full review is posted you'll be able to check it out right here you guys I hope you have an incredible week God bless and we will catch you in the next video

Channel: Youthman

Views: 78,078

Keywords: Home Theater, Youthman, Home Cinema, Dolby Atmos, 4K, HDR, Dolby, Harmony, Logitech, Logitech Harmony, Harmony Elite, Sofabaton, Sofabaton X1, Sofabaton X1S, Universal Remote

Id: CBX1QWeILtU

Length: 38min 14sec (2294 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024