Catering Digital TV and Set-top Box to Remote Controllers

With the rapid development of digital TV and deployment of set-top boxes, standardizing remote controllers for both digital TV and set-top box has become an issue for digital TV operators, set-top box producers and remote controller manufacturers. This paper presented a novel method to solve the incompatibility problem among different digital TV sets, set-top boxes and remote controllers. This novel method tries to cater digital TV sets and set-top boxes to remote controllers instead of designing a universal standardized remote controller for digital TV sets and set-top boxes. The benefits of the new method are shown by comparison of the novel solution with the universal remote controller based method. Some design guidelines for the proposed method are also presented in this paper.