I am overloading 6 VCR buttons (with the switch it is up to 18 effective buttons) because other buttons are used already. It's an audio system remote, remember?

However, those audio system control buttons are absolutely useless, at least for me - the only one I use is audio system on/off. Even volume, I control either from notebook section (when listening to music), either from TV section (when HDMI is enabled, notebook volume is set to max automatically).

And the useless buttons kinda annoy me, even though the different layouts for listening to music and for video playback proved to be very comfortable over time.

I think it should be mentioned that I'm not considering wi-fi as an option since my devices are old but slightly better than many new ones on the market and guess I'm not alone in such situation.

Also, it's inconvenient and ineffective (eats too much battery) to control pc over wi-fi and other devices over ir when you just want to turn on audio player or watch a movie; IMO it should be all ir or wi-fi, not both, and ir is better if available.