[mythtv-users] Controlling a satellite box from MythTV

[Dewey Smolka]

>
> You can use an IR Blaster driven by LIRC, or you can use the
> "MyBlaster" device which is controlled by a Perl script that does not
> require LIRC.
>
<snip>
> Both methods work. The former is a little cheaper but more trouble to
> get set up, the latter approach costs a little more ($50US) but is
> extremely simply to set up.
>

I'm going to agree with Brian here. Last year I spent about a week
wrestling with lirc to get a PVR-250 IR reciever and a serial IR
blaster working together at the same time. I was never able to get
both to work reliably and stay working.

Maybe there are people more clever and more experienced than me who
can do this easily, but it had me stumped and frustrated.

So I bought the MyBlaster device, had it up and running within 15
minutes of it arriving at my door, and haven't had to touch it or
think about it since. It's been up and running for nearly a year, and
I've had maybe five cases where it failed to properly change the
channel (out of thousands of channel changes). Even when I managed to
coax some output from my serial lirc blaster, the failure rate was
significant enough to be worrying -- I estimated at the time that it
failed 10 to 20 percent of the time, and that was when it was working.

As always YMMV, but the MyBlaster is $50 well spent.