Say for Start recording you want to accept just the capital letter ‘A’. Set the 2nd column to FFFF and the 3rd column to 0041 (see ASCII chart above). If you set the mask to 0041, it would allow both the capitol and lower-case a, but it would also allow every other letter (C, E, G, etc). You could match both cases of A if you set the mask to 00DF and the value to 0041.
The digital input ports are a little easier to understand. There are 4 functions Start, Stop, Pause, Resume. You could use the top 4 digital input bits to start, stop pause, and resume in that order and ignore the other bits of the port. If you use bit 13-16 you would set the 2nd column to F000 and compare to 8000 to have bit 16 start recording, use 4000 to have bit 15 stop recording, 2000 to have bit 14 pause recording and 1000 to have bit 13 resume recording. If 2 bits go high at the same time, nothing will happen because it won’t equal the correct value.