I went to play with a Beo5 recently.  It was set up to a BS3.  Then I tried skipping chapters with the up/down buttons on the outer ring.  Didn't work.  Apparently, these are not programmable.  Is this really true?  Can anyone out there skip through chapters this way?  The dealer said I'd have to hit the green button first.  Yuck.  I really want the Beo5 to make things intuitive.

 -- Paul 

Actually, pressing the green button before pressing the up or down button is a result of the BS3 programming rather than the Beo5. Perhaps the BS3 was connected to an HD DVD or Blu-Ray player? The BS1/BS3 is configured to work with certain HD DVD and Blu-Ray players so that pressing certain color buttons switches between "menu" and "transport" modes for the up,down, left, and right buttons. This is necessary because of the nature of HD DVD and Blu-Ray menu navigation while a movie is playing. Once you press the color button to switch to transport mode, however, you stay in transport mode and no longer need to press the color button until you switch back to menu mode. This would be the same with a Beo4. However, you CAN program the Beo5 with macros so that pressing a button on the touch screen will change to transport mode and skip to the next chapter. This is what I have done.

Actually, it was a Blu-ray player.  Would a regular DVD player NOT have this behavior?

I'm also still confused.  Wouldn't a Blu-ray player's remote have separate menu navigation and chapter skip buttons, just like a regular DVD remote?  I thought the transport mode existed on the Beo4 simply because there weren't enough buttons.  However the Beo5 has a dedicated menu navigation control at its center, as well as separate /\ \/ << and >> hard buttons, so I figured transport mode would no longer be needed.

-- Paul 

I certainly don't disagree with you. Hopefully B&O will update the Beosystem 1 and Beosystem 3 to provide some options to take advantage of such features of the Beo5. Another area where the current programming of the Beosystem 1 does not take advantage of the capabilities of the Beo5 is where it has multiple video sources toggled on the "TV" button. The Beo5 could eliminate the need to change the video source selection. Just one less button to have to push.

Good news, Paul. It seems that the navigation buttons on the round part of the Beo5 ARE programmable. From the "Edit" screen, you can right click on the button and change the IR commands and create macros. I noticed that B&O has created macros for the BeoCenter 2 MK1 to add the "go" command after the navigation buttons on the outer ring while making the navigation buttons on the inner ring such that they trigger the direction commands only without the "go" command. Brilliant!

 Now I just need to edit these buttons for my BD and HD DVD players.