In an infrared remote control device, communication between a host CPU and an infrared controller is compressed by encoding the signal into pulse data (“PD”) number or sequence data that corresponds to each pulse data type. Encoding and decoding is performed by table look ups that associate the pulse data types with the PD numbers. Because conventional infrared control devices represent each infrared pulse as a four byte digital number, when the PD number is represented by 4 bits, a maximum of 16 types of pulse data can be stored in the data, making it possible to compress the communication data volume to ⅛ as compared to the uncompressed data volume.