Missing the Color Buttons on Your Old Remote? Here’s How You Deal With That

All new products from DIRECTV now ship with the RC7-series Genie Remote. While this remote wasn’t well received at first, most people have warmed up to its smaller size and ease of use. Those advancements come at a price, though, and when you have the same size buttons on a smaller remote you’re going to need to get rid of a few of them. That’s precisely what the folks at DIRECTV did. They left the RED button, but ditched the YELLOWGREEN, and BLUE ones. The red button is used for DIRECTV scoreguide and to delete programs, but the other colors were… expendable I guess, although they did perform essential functions. Luckily, all their functions can be accessed using other buttons. Here’s how to get along without them:

YELLOW: The yellow button brought up the info bar at the top of live TV, and also brought up context-sensitive menus (like a right-click) from the guide and list. For the info bar, use the {INFO} button. For the context menus, use the {DASH} button (to the left of the zero.)

GREEN: In the guide, you could use the red button to go back 12 hours and the green button to go forward 12 hours. Now you use the {REWIND} button to go back 12 hours and the {FAST FORWARD} button to go forward 12 hours. Many years ago, you could set a “bookmark” in recorded programming using the green button, but that function is no longer available.

BLUE: The blue button had two functions. In live TV it brought up a mini guide at the bottom of the screen, while in the playlist it let you change a recording so it wouldn’t get deleted. Both these functions can now be accessed using the {ENTER} button to the right of the zero.

Of course if you want you can still use an older-style DIRECTV remote, but my feeling is that you came to this article because you actually like the Genie Remote and just want to figure out a way to use a few of those other features. Your call.