TV remote controls

Every screen is fully navigable with a D-pad. Nothing needs a touchscreen or a mouse.

The channel list

Key	What it does
Up / Down	Move the selection. Down wraps around at the bottom; Up never wraps — at the top it moves you out of the list instead.
Right	First to the channel’s favorite star, then across to the next pane.
Left	Back off the star, then across to the category list.
OK	Start a preview. Press again to go fullscreen.
Number keys	Type a channel number to jump to it.

Up deliberately never wraps. In an earlier design it did, and people got stuck cycling the category list with no way out.

Preview

Highlighting a channel does not start playing it — only pressing OK does. That is on purpose: a preview opens a connection to your provider, and most subscriptions allow only one at a time, so a preview that followed the cursor would fight with itself as you scrolled.

Press OK again on the previewing channel and it goes fullscreen without reconnecting, so there is no second stall and no second connection.

Back

Back peels off exactly one thing per press, in a fixed order:

channel list → first channel → categories → first category → search → tabs → exit

It never changes your data or your filters. The last press asks for a second Back to confirm before leaving the app.

In the player

Key	What it does
OK	Show or hide the controls
Left / Right	Seek (on-demand content only — live has no seek bar)
Up / Down	Move between controls
Back	Close the menu, then the info panel, then the controls, then exit

The control row carries play/pause, aspect ratio, and on live channels the quick-list button, “Go to live” while you’re behind the live edge, and the favorite star.

Changing channel in the player

On a live channel you don’t have to leave fullscreen to change channel. While the controls are hidden:

Key	What it does
Up / Down	Next / previous channel. Both ends wrap around.
Right	Back to the previous channel — press again to swap back.
Left or GUIDE	Open the quick list (below).
Number keys	Type a channel number; it switches after a short pause, or straight away on OK.
CH+ / CH−, Page Up / Page Down	Next / previous channel, whether the controls are showing or not.

A banner at the bottom shows where you’ve got to as you press, and the channel only switches once you stop — holding Up to scan past twenty channels opens one connection to your provider, not twenty. If a channel fails to start, you’re put back on the one you were watching.

The channels you move through are the ones you launched from: the category you were in, your favorites in their usual order, or the guide’s list. A channel number you type is looked up in that same list, and “No channel N” means it isn’t in it.

The previous channel is remembered across sessions — watch one channel, go back to the list, open another, and Right still takes you to the first.

With the controls showing, Up and Down go back to moving between the controls, so press Back once to hide them before zapping.

The quick list

Left (or GUIDE) opens a list over the picture, positioned on the channel you’re watching:

• Channels — each with what’s on now. OK switches to it and closes the list.
• Right on a channel shows its schedule for today. If the channel has catch-up, OK on a past programme plays it.
• Left steps back up, to the list of categories. Picking a category also changes which channels Up and Down move through.
• Back closes the list from the top.

Nothing changes channel while the list is open except an explicit OK, so browsing it is safe. With a mouse or a touchscreen, the list button in the control row (just left of “Go to live”) opens it.

On a keyboard

The desktop apps follow the same rules: arrow keys stand in for the D-pad, Enter for OK, and Esc for Back — it peels the same ladder, one press at a time. A keyboard has no GUIDE key, so G opens and closes the quick list.

Aspect ratio

Cycles Fit → Fill → Stretch → 16:9 → 4:3.

Fill crops to fill the screen and keeps the picture’s shape. Stretch distorts it to fill and keeps every pixel. They are different, and Fill is almost always the one you want.

The choice is remembered per source. On a television the default is Fill, which on a 16:9 panel showing 16:9 content looks identical to Fit; on a desktop the default is Fit, because a window is whatever shape you dragged it to. On a phone or tablet it follows how you’re holding it: Fill in landscape, Fit in portrait, where Fill would show only a sliver of the middle of the picture.