Abstract: A control system comprises multiple consumer electronics devices and task-driven control means coupled to the devices for controlling an interaction among the devices. The control means acts on respective software representations of each respective one of the consumer devices. By encapsulating the variable complexity of the task within a software representation, it can be made as simple or as sophisticated as needed to bring the capabilities up to a common level. Since the level of interface is common to the devices, applications can uniformly manipulate devices which embody very different levels of sophistication.

Abstract: A programmable remote controller is programmed by a PC that has an onboard data base for sets of codes used by a variety of commercially available remote controllers. The data base contains sets of compressed codes. In order to program the remote, the user lets the PC find a match between a single pulse-code transmitted by a specific known controller on the one hand and an item in the data base on the other hand. Upon finding the match, the set containing the matching item is stored in the programmable controller as corresponding to the particular apparatus that is controllable via the specific remote.