Remote control of a MAG box - or boxes

Lots of us have MAG boxes and I'm sure some will have the output fed into another room (or would like to) but that raises problems of control because of course for an IR remote control to work it needs to be able to 'see' the box.

Remote control extenders are available but they cost money and in my personal experience at least are not very reliable and can involve a lot of juggling to find the best locations for the transmitters and receivers.

Fortunately there is another way and that's with an Android app called unsurprisingly MAG 254 remote (no idea if it's available for CrApple devices). This works over WiFi meaning that you can now control a box from anywhere your WiFi reaches, there is separate app for newer the 322/324 models. The caveat is that you need to be able to get into your box to set it up for use with an external remote control which involves no more than turning on the Remote Control feature and assigning a unique name and PW to it, if your box is locked to a provider then that may not be possible although if you ask they might be willing to do it for you.

It gets better because now the box (or boxes) have unique ID's that makes it possible to independently control two MAG boxes even if they are sitting side by side in the same place something which is impossible to do with the normal supplied remote control because it's common to all MAG boxes (well 95% common anyway) so to use it with two boxes you'd have to temporarily physically mask the one you did not want to change.

To distribute the output from a MAG box you can use long HDMI cables with splitters and/or switches to suit your actual needs. I do this and am running a TV in a study on a 10m cable with a splitter and another 10m cable running from there to the bedroom so 20m in total.

From either location I can choose which MAG box I want to watch and then using a phone can control it just as if I were standing in front of it.