Hi,
Basically the TV remote controllers use different pulse rate for each switches. You can connect an IR receiver to the microcontroller’s ‘event counter’ pin and hence count the number of pulses occuring at a given interval of time.
But there are TV remote decder kits available, the output of which you can connect to the input pins of microocontroller.
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/ETP/TV%20remote%20decoder%20kit%20ver%202_2.pdf