We use a set-top-box as the video source for mythtv. And while this works perfectly fine, we have to manually make sure the right channel is set for what mythtv wants to record. This can turn out to being a pain at time, especially when multiple things are planned to be recorded on different channels. So I went and ordered a IR transmitter from irblaster.info to give mythtv the possibility to change channels itself.

Since a bunch of the infos I found online were a bit out dated, here are a few tips for anyone using current versions of the software (I’ve got mythtv-backend 0.22 and lirc 0.8.4a running on a mythbuntu based system when I wrote this)

Hardware is easy to set up, just plug it into a free serial port.
1st we will head over to http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/ and grab the file for our reciever set-top-box if we don’t already have them.
Then go edit /etc/lirc/hardware.conf and add the transmitter settings, these were mine:

TRANSMITTER="Skymaster_XL10"
TRANSMITTER_MODULES="lirc_dev lirc_serial"
TRANSMITTER_DRIVER=""
TRANSMITTER_DEVICE="/dev/lirc1"
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF="skymaster/XL10"
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""

/bin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none

#!/bin/bash
 
Remote="Skymaster_XL10"
 
send="irsend -d /dev/lircd1 SEND_ONCE"
 
if [[ "$(echo $1|grep -c "^[0-9]")" = "0" ]]
then # non-numeric command
  $send $Remote $1
else # numeric
  for digit in $(echo $1 | sed -e 's/./& /g'); do
    $send $Remote $digit
    sleep 1.5
  done
fi
sleep 2