It’s all too simple to miss the standard of the distant management when selecting a streaming system, as I’ve written before.

You may not understand it from the worth tag, as an illustration, however the $180 Apple TV 4K has one of many worst remotes available on the market. The slim design too simply slips between sofa cushions, and its trackpad-based controls have a steep studying curve. Conversely, the $29 Roku Express looks like an awesome worth till you understand that its distant lacks basic TV controls.

What’s a cord-cutter to do, then? If you’re caught with a nasty distant, take into account a third-party alternative as a substitute of shopping for a completely new streaming system. Here are a pair choices I’ve provide you with:

Third-party IR remotes for Apple TV and Roku

My impetus for this little experiment was One For All’s URC 795 common streamer distant. Just a few weeks in the past, I noticed it on sale for $15 at Best Buy, down from the common $25, so I made a decision to see how it could work as a alternative distant for Apple TV and Roku gamers. (At the time this story was edited, Walmart was selling a version of the URC 795 for $17, and eBay has open box ones for even less.)

What drew me to the One for All distant was its design, which seems prefer it’s meant for streaming as a substitute of cable. The format of the directional pad and navigation buttons are just like that of a Roku distant, and there are not any quantity keys or different pointless cable distant litter.

Out of the field, the distant works with any Roku participant that helps infrared enter. Those embrace the high-end Roku Ultra and the finances Roku Express and Premiere fashions, however not the Roku Streaming Stick or Stick+. It also can management energy, quantity, and inputs on Samsung TVs by default.

To use the One for All distant with different gadgets, you must enter particular button combos as outlined within the instruction handbook. Pairing an Apple TV, as an illustration, requires holding down the streamer energy button and residential button, then letting go and holding down the TV energy button. It’s a clunky course of, however the upside is which you can program a streaming field, TV, and A/V gear to work concurrently. That means you may consolidate remotes with out having to fiddle with HDMI-CEC.

With setup out of the way in which, I used to be impressed with the distant total. While infrared is inherently much less responsive than the Bluetooth connections utilized by most streaming remotes, I didn’t have any points controlling my Apple TV 4K, even outdoors my house workplace from 20 ft away. The rubberized buttons really feel snappy, and in contrast to with most streaming remotes, they’re backlit.