I played around with videolan a little. The reason I want to do this is to use my 802.11b network to watch live tv. (I can't run wires so both PC's are on 802.11b) I used it a few years ago to watch dvd on my desktop from my laptop's dvd player. It worked very well. I am trying to get it to work using myth. It is easy to install, I used the instructions from here:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-debian.html
I was am able to watch .mpg files (from a dvd rip) in the /myth/video directory but using the transcode setting and drop the bitrate down really far. It played it fine. I then experimented with one of the ringbuffer.nuv files in /cache. It played it but the video was pushed down about 1/4 of the way, pushing the bottom off the screen and at the top were green/red/blue lines (like it wasn't getting anything). I played around with the settings a little bit and now it just shows green/red/blue lines completely, so I don't know what I did the first time! I also tried to have it stream /dev/video0, but nothing at all came from that. I installed it using apt-get so maybe the pvr part isn't enabled..
I think it will work if the right settings are figured out. There has been talk about this here and on gossamer threads, does anyone have experience, or want to help get it to work?

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ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
512K Kingston PC2100 Memory
MicroAtx Case
2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital

Did some playing with this. while I got it running, I was unhappy with video quality. I did not change my current recording settings. Rather Im looking into minimum frontend HW configs to to setup a frontend machine.

I have run the FE CD on my laptop, video plays perfectly. I think the windows piece is the bottleneck

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

i had videolan working perfectly, and the video quality was perfect. But i gave up for a different reason.. it just does not intergrate well into myth. quick example.. if your doing serverside streaming. you need to have a xterminal window open. running it without.. like using a script executed from the mythgui errors, because it doesnt have an output.. I probley did a terrible job explaining that.. but hopefully you can get what i mean.. You can use what the refer to as Ondemand.. but that offers no advantage over samba and clicking on a movie link. I was able to watch TV fine.. (couldnt quite get channel changing to work), but myth doesnt have access to that tuner when you use it.. (makes sense). anyway i didnt find it to be a perfect fit.

I'm running VLC on a mac os X laptop and using it to as a streaming client from over 802.11g from the Mythtv box that's on 100Mb wired ethernet. Works great, and I can watch my TV recordings from any room in the house.

The way I'm doing it, I use the mythweb as the primary interface. I have my helper apps set so that when I click a link that points to a .yuv file (from the recorded programs list) it tells VLC to open that link as an http stream. so far works great, and the quality's good too if you tell VLC to deinterlace (bob) the output.

im not totaly sure i understand, do you mind doing a howto in more depth?