> Wow, that much from a 5mm IR LED?

I just had a look at a typical 60mA IR LED. Pulsed current is 1.3A
for t = 10us. There are 5mm LEDs which can take 1500mA statically
(OP293 for example). I believe temperature is the determining factor
wrt the safety of the die and I think to some extent you can estimate
what's safe by working out the average wattage. It's not unusual to find
that eg 20mA LEDs in strobed applications like moving signs run quite
warm. The LEDs will have limiting resistors of perhaps 47ohms with
a 12V supply. Without strobing the LED would soon burn out with
this x10 current

Some IR controls do use pulses as short as 10us (which you could
use if the receiver can discriminate pulses that short), although I think
the common RC5 protocol is something like 1ms

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