[mythtv-users] AppleTV, lirc, and a Bose Lifestyle RF Remote

Paul Fine pfine at comcast.net
Fri May 30 19:47:03 UTC 2008


My current mythtv system consists of a FE/BE Fedora 7 based system with 
a PVR-350 and a PVR-150 setup via Jared Wilson's guide.  I use the 
Hauppauge remote and IR receiver that came with the PVR-350. The rest of 
my home entertainment hodgepodge consists of a Bose Lifestyle 38 system, 
comcast cablebox and a crappy SDTV.  The Bose system has an RF remote 
which can be configured to act as a type of IR Blaster.  By that, I 
mean, you can configure the Lifestyle 38 to translate various buttons 
presses from the RF Remote to broadcast IR commands, which in turn are 
received by the targeted component's IR receiver.  One of the settings 
on the Bose Remote will allow me to control my cablebox.

The way the Bose Remote is configured is by selecting which specific 
device you want to control.  For the cablebox, I needed to select 
Motorola as my cablebox brand, and then I tried the various offered 
codes for the Motorola until I found the setting that worked best with 
my cablebox.

I recently purchased an AppleTV and have brought up on it (mostly) a 
mythfrontend using Scott Davilla's excellent wikis 
(http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/).  What I would like to do is 
find a setting on the Bose Lifestyle that would allow me to control the 
AppleTV with the Bose RF Remote.

It appears that the Apple IR Remote uses the NEC IR Remote Protocol (see 
http://www.barchard.net/files/apple_ir_remote_analysis.html and 
http://www.sbprojects.com/knowledge/ir/nec.htm).  My idea was to 
configure my Bose remote for various NEC remote control codes, and then 
use irrecord to see if the AppleIR Remote receiver would respond to any 
of them.

Unfortunately, I did not have any success.

Am I totally offbase thinking that this could ever work?  Any 
suggestions on what I might try next? 

My fallback option is to purchase a USB IR receiver, say a MCE remote, 
and then attempt to find the right code in the Bose configuration to 
control my AppleTV frontend with the external USB IR receiver instead of 
the builtin one.




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