Instead of upgrading the old box(R5A16), I'm going to build a new one(R5D1) and upgrade the mobo and hard drive. The "new" motherboard has no serial ports so that's gonna make it tough to control the DirecTV box with the currently working cable/script combo.
Has anyone been successful using a USB to serial adapter with the rca_control.pl script? If you got it to work, do you have any suggestions on brand of adapter? Any gotchas or did it just work? Thanks!

What type of motherboard did you get?

I recently got an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard that doesn't have serial ports on the back panel. However it does have two serial headers on the motherboard for use with an adapter that fits into a PCI cover.
The mini-itx.com store has one on their perifery page. http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=9
I needed one for my remote receiver so I got two from local pc shops. The first one's cable was too short to fit reach the m/b header so I had to find another shop with a longer one. First place gave it to me for free, and the second charged about $5 AUD.

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Paul Turpie
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Well, don't laugh, but the plan is to use a Sony Vaio desktop that was discarded. It has a 3Ghz processor and 1Gb of RAM, but the hard drive isn't gonna cut it at 120Gb. 8 USB ports, but no serial ports. I haven't dug deep enough into the case yet to see if there's a serial header. That would certainly be cool if there was one.

I hate to see a thread unfinished. I purchased a USB to Serial adapter from Geeks.com. It uses the Prolific chip set(PL2303). KnoppMyth easily detected it and it works fine controlling my DirecTV box using the rca_control.pl script. Just remember to modify the script to point to ttyUSB0 instead of ttyS0. You also have to modifiy the permissions for the device so the mythtv account can access it. Also be sure to put the script in a directory where the mythtv account has access to it(or give it access).

Oh this is such sweet news! I have been looking at this motherboard but was reluctant because of the lack of a serial port. I was looking to get a Streamzap remote and just useing the usb receiver with my own remote.

I have a half-dozen of those serial port brackets. I could rig up one of those with my homebrew serial receiver and mount it in place of a LED or something inside a home theater case and have a built in IR receiver

I bet if there was someone else in the room when I read your post they could have seen the light bulb go on over my head just light in the cartoons.

Thanks for the info!

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)