Patent ID: 6934713

Claim:
A method of selecting user-preferred programs from a plurality of programs to be viewed or stored using a memory of an audio/video apparatus, the method comprising: obtaining a first set of user-defined criteria for identifying preferred program attributes from user input, the preferred program attributes including attributes which a program must have in order to be of interest to the user; obtaining a second set of user-defined criteria for identifying non-preferred program attributes from user input, the non-preferred program attributes including attributes which a program must not have in order to be of interest to the user; accessing a first database that includes program information describing the plurality of programs through program attributes, the plurality of programs including at least one undesirable program having at least one preferred program attribute in combination with at least one non-preferred program attribute; and sorting through the first database using the first set of user-defined criteria and the second set of user-defined criteria to select programs that have the preferred program attributes and that do not have the non-preferred program attributes, the at least one undesirable program excluded from the selected programs.