Well, USB IrDA dongles cannot be used for receiving signals from IR remotes anyway as is explained at the lirc website: http://lirc.org/irda.html. If you want to be flexible in choosing your remote (i.e. want comms/lirc to be able to receive and decode "raw" IR pulses) then there are two types of USB receivers known to work on FreeBSD:cahimira said:But birda use a serial line like old COM1 port. birda not support USB IrDA devices. I work in a project for build a MEDIA CENTER solution based en FreeBSD. And I need to control the media center using a regular IR remote. The media center hardware don't have serial ports, only USB ports.
# lircd -H ftdi -d input=<pin number>