IR sensor from a Typhoon TV card

I have a old Typhoon TV card that i had laying around unused becose it isnt compactible whith Windows 2000.I rememberd that it had a remote control so i used the IR recever. I cut the wire(The audio plug can seve for somting else)and it was an coax stereo audio cable. So there are three contacts (whith,red,coax raping).So it has the decoder allredy in.
is there any useful things this can be used for or is the IR sesitive diode more useful.

assuming it has the AGC, demodulator, etc inside, you could use it to add IR capability to just about anything with a microcontroller. The RC5 and RECS80 protocols are available and the RC5 in particular is very easy to do on a micro.