AVR-Stick as an infrared receiver and logger

I have already described a project based on the AVR-Stick hardware. The next thing I wanted to try with that hardware is to create an infrared receiver and logger. In fact I wanted to emulate the dongle I described some time ago. But to emulate it I needed to know the protocol that is used. The easiest way to find out what protocol is used is to analyze signals with an oscilloscope of course but I didn't have one. So first of all I needed to implement a signal logging functionality.