You could definitely do that, but you guessed right. There is no way to assign remote codes to one box and not the other. The DVR and Mate use identical remote controls.

There are physical buttons on the front of the units. Off the top of my head, they have a d-pad with select button and the menu button. This should allow you to do almost anything without the remote control.

Just so you know, I'm not a Moxi evangelist. The only reason I settled on it was the superior multi-room setup. I wanted to rent only one cablecard, and this was the only way to do this (with a CE device). My other option was two Tivo Premieres with lifetime which would have cost more money up-front and require two cablecards. The Premiere was also getting poor reviews for its UI speed at the time of my Moxi purchase.

I'm surprised that Tivo still hasn't gotten the Premiere working smoothly. I'm also not fond of the ads in menus and during trickplay my friend's S3 Tivos have. The Moxi is 100% ad-free and trickplay on the DVR is fast. It's not as fast as Tivo, but it's faster than the HR20-23 series of DirecTV DVRs.

I'm anxious to see what comes from Microsoft in the form of a more consumer-oriented DVR solution. I'm also up for seeing what Tivo is going to do, but I'm really against paying them gobs of money and then having ads fed to me. I don't anticipate Moxi coming out with another retail box. It seems Arris bought Moxi from Digeo to get their IP. This 6-tuner DVR/media gateway for cable operators is the first product to come from this union.

I don't think I mentioned it yet, but Moxi lacks a wishlist-type function. This could be a deal-breaker for some.