Difference between revisions of "Using an IR Blaster with MythTV"

Revision as of 03:06, 2 December 2005

Email: [[Mail To(rwraithr AT SPAMFREE iwamble DOT net)]]

by Robert Wamble

Due to an impending move, the IR Blaster Howto has a new location, given below.

Current Location of IR Blaster Howto and various files: [1]

The mission was to get MythTV to use my Actisys IR-200L blaster to change channels on my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000. Since MythTV uses lirc for its remote control, and lirc has not (for me) easily handled two devices simultaneously, I had to get an independent lirc running to drive the blaster. To do this, I followed the recommendations found in mythtv-users postings by Sriram Balakrishnan, Gary Te Young, and Mike Smith.

The HOWTO and accompanying scripts comprise my attempt to steamline the process for others. While I can only say that this works for my setup, hopefully it will be helpful with other hardware combinations.

A download link is available at the page above for an already converted remote-0.7.0pre?.tar.bz2, so that you can skip the script based process of converting lirc-0.7.0* to remote-0.7.0*. There's also a link to a channel.pl that handles 4 digit channels.

Alternative IR Blaster HOWTO

A second IR BLASTER HOWTO has been posted to [2] with a mirror at [3]

IR Blaster Setup without compiling second instance of LIRC

This is an IR Blaster setup guide primarily meant for FC3 users who followed Jarod Wilson's setup guide. With this version, a second install of LIRC is not needed. All necessary components can be downloaded from atrpms.net via apt-get (which will already be done if Jarod's guide was followed). This means that no compiling is necessary. Simply editing a few files is enough to achieve this. This is especially useful for FC3 users, as kernel source is no longer included with that linux distribution.

[4]