Every remote key in the player, and what it does

Remotes vary more than anything else about a television. A Fire TV remote has no colour buttons and no number pad. Some Android TV remotes have a dedicated guide key, most do not. Cheap box remotes ship with buttons that do nothing in any app. InoxTV handles this by treating every key as reassignable, in three separate contexts.

Everything below is the shipped default. Change any of it in Settings › Remote control › Player.

The D-pad, which is where most of it lives

The pattern is worth noticing before you start changing things. Pressing a direction moves you between channels; holding the same direction opens a feature. Left is the exception, because both of its assignments open the channel list, as an overlay on a press, in preview mode on a hold.

Every key and its default action

Twenty‑nine keys, in the order the app lists them. The labels in the left column are exactly what you will see on the mapping screen, brackets and all.

Everything a key can be assigned to

The action list is the same for every key, so any of these can go on any button. Grouped by what they are for:

Channels

• Turn on next channel, Turn on previous channel — switch immediately.
• Turn on most recent channel — back to what you were watching before this one.
• Show info panel for next channel, Show info panel for previous channel — look without switching.
• Show recent channels, Show info panel and recent channels, Show info panel.

Lists and the guide

• Show channels list in overlay mode — the list over the video.
• Show channels list in preview mode — the list beside a shrunken picture.
• Open TV guide in overlay mode, Open TV guide groups in overlay mode.
• Show program description, Search, Show menu.

Playback

• Play/pause, Restart current program, Go to live stream.
• Audio tracks, Closed captions, Display mode — the three overlays you reach for in the first minute of a channel.
• Volume up, Volume down, Volume mute.

Exits

• Open settings, Go back, Exit.
• Ignore — the one people forget. It makes a key do nothing, which is the fix for a button you keep hitting by accident.

Four that are in the list but not connected

Multiview, Picture-in-picture, Sleep timer and Audio offset can all be assigned, and a key holding one of them does nothing when pressed. That is on purpose: the key is swallowed rather than allowed to fall through to some other behaviour, so at least the result is predictable. They are in the list because they are what the player is heading towards, not because they are hidden behind a setting you have missed.

Skip them when you are planning a layout. Two of the four sit on Long Up and Long Down out of the box, which means the shipped defaults leave you two free keys whether you wanted them or not.

Two actions in the list are worth promoting because nothing holds them by default. Restart current program jumps to the start of the buffer the stream is carrying, and Go to live stream takes you back to the live edge. How far either one moves you is decided by the stream rather than by the app, a channel served with a rolling window lets you move inside it, and one served without a window has nowhere to go. On the streams that do carry a window, that pair on Rewind(RW) and Fast forward(FF) is a better use of those buttons than a second and third route to channel information.

One key gets you most of it: the tool strip

Before you spend an evening assigning keys, look at what Show menu already reaches. It is on Long OK and Menu by default, and it opens a row of icons along the bottom of the picture that Left and Right walk through, wrapping round at either end. Eight of its tiles go somewhere:

• Search and TV List — the two you would otherwise burn keys on.
• Video track, Audio track and Subtitle track, each labelled with the track you are currently on rather than with its own name.
• Aspect ratio, labelled with the current mode, offering eight of them and an Apply to all channels switch so a fix sticks — what each mode does is worth a read if your picture is the wrong shape.
• Add to favorites and Settings.

The strip also carries tiles for Multiview, Recordings, audio delay and a reminder, and those four are drawn but not connected, the same four ideas that appear unconnected in the action list. The strip hides itself after five seconds, which is short enough that it is worth learning the icon positions rather than reading along it each time.

Nothing in the working eight needs a key of its own. Assign keys to the two or three things you do several times an evening, and leave the rest to one menu press, a remote where every button does something surprising is worse than one extra press.

The seeking switches, and what they currently do

Settings › Remote control carries a Player seeking options block with three switches:

Be aware of what these do today: the app stores whichever way you set them, and playback does not yet read them. Catch‑up browsing (asking a provider for a programme that finished yesterday), is not in this build either, so there is no catch‑up state for them to apply to. Changing them changes nothing you will see, and it is better to know that than to spend an evening toggling them.

If you want Rewind(RW) and Fast forward(FF) doing something other than channel information, assign them directly in the key table above. That works now and it is not conditional on anything.

What to change on the remote you actually own

A Fire TV remote. No colour buttons, no Guide, no Info, no page keys, so five of the defaults above are unreachable. The buttons you do have are the D-pad, Back, Menu (the three‑line one), Play/Pause, Rewind(RW) and Fast forward(FF). Long presses are what save you: Long Menu already opens the guide, and Long Back is search.

An Android TV remote with a dedicated guide key. Nothing needs changing. Guide opens the guide, Menu opens the menu, and the D-pad defaults are sensible as shipped. The colour buttons, if it has them, are the only real spare capacity: three of the four open something the guide already reaches.

A box remote with a full keypad and colour row. You have more buttons than the defaults use, and three of the four colour keys open something the guide already reaches. This is the case where Restart current program, Go to live stream and Show program description are worth promoting onto real keys.

Any remote with a button you keep pressing by mistake. Assign it Ignore. Trying to retrain your thumb never works as well as making the button harmless.

Getting back to the defaults

Restore to defaults at the top of the mapping screen resets every key in that context to the table above. It is scoped to the context you are in, so restoring the player leaves your guide and movies mappings alone.

The other two contexts have their own tables: keys in the TV guide and keys on the movies and shows screens. The same physical button can hold three different actions, one per context, and in the shipped defaults it often does.