It’s another feature you weren’t really aware of. Those four colored buttons on the remote. A lot of remotes have colored buttons on them. In Europe they’ve been the rage for decades, and they’ve been on every white DIRECTV remote for the last decade. What do they do?
RED BUTTON
The red button is sometimes confused with the record button, because the record button on other devices is a red dot. On a DIRECTV remote the red button does several things:
- If you’ve highlighted something in the playlist, pressing {RED} will delete it.
- If you’re in the guide, pressing {RED} will go back in time 12 hours (but not further back than the present time.) Pressing {REWIND} will do this too.
- On sports channels, {RED} gives you a ScoreGuide app.
GREEN BUTTON
The green button doesn’t have a lot to do. At one time it was used for a feature called “bookmarks” which let you set up a point in a recording and skip to it easily. That feature is on its way out.
You can press {GREEN} to add a channel to your quick tune menu or press {ENTER} to do the same thing.
Another thing you can do with the green button is skip forward in time 12 hours within the guide. Pressing {FAST FORWARD} will do that too, making the green button sort of useless.
YELLOW BUTTON
The yellow button is the Jack of all trades in the DIRECTV universe. It’s like a right-click feature.
- Press{YELLOW} on live TV to pull up the top banner. {INFO} will also do this.
- If you’re in the guide or playlist, {YELLOW} will bring up a list of things you can do there.
BLUE BUTTON
The blue button also doesn’t have a lot of use, but it does one interesting thing: Pressing it while on live TV gives you the Mini Guide, which gives you a quick one-line display at the bottom of the screen.
Pressing {BLUE} while in the playlist will also let you “keep” a recording, meaning it won’t be deleted even if you are running out of space.
DIRECTV is rumored to be reorganizing its remote buttons a little bit and it should be interesting to see what tasks remain for the color buttons.
