Taking back my last. It was a stupid configuration error I made. It took a while but now I have lirc doing my bidding both on the xbox mythtv frontend, as well as the backed machine running with a pvr-500. For the xbox frontend using the xbox dvd kit the working lircrc found here had to be copied to .lircrc and a softlink made like so ln -s ~/.lircrc ~/.mythtv/lircrc. For the backend I found working instructions here . And an lircd.conf to use with my SA3250 here .