We have all used InfraRed based remotes to control various appliances around our house. All these remote work by transmitting data in form of flashes of infrared light - and wherever one needs to transmit data, there is always a protocol involved. The RC-5 protocol from Philips has been used in TVs, VCRs and other appliances since the past three decades. It was developed by Philips but was adopted by many other manufacturers. Now days RC-5 has been superseded by RC-6 and various other protocols from various other manufacturers. These newer protocols have better features and are more flexible. San Bergmans's KnowledgeBase on Consumer IR is a nice place to lookup information (protocol specs, circuits, embedded code) on any of the old or new IR based protocols. Here is how a RC-5 TV remote control transmitter unit looks like: And here is a InfraRed receiver/demodulator: A RC-5 codeword is 14 bit long. The first two are the start bits, then comes the toggle bit and finally the 5 bits