Displayserver is a really cool hack, and might be exactly what the poster's looking for. But I know that I, at least, have had a 33% failure rate with it (it works on 2 of my 3 boxes. Havne't yet been able to debug the third).

Basically, it's a kernel that's been hacked to allow read access to the display and write access to the IR device, such that another program (actually, a minimal web server kicked off by a modified init script) can receive IR commands from the network, and can send out an image of the screen.

You connect to it with a web browser, and it sends back a java applet, that lets you hit buttons on a virtual receiver. Those presses get sent back to the receiver, and are inserted into the IR Remote command queue. The display is sampled, and returned to the applet in a fairly continuous (and nearly seamlessly real-time) stream.

The only problem with it (as I mentioned in another post in the Technical section) is that, while it's cool for remotely controlling a system, it's not really suitable for scripting remote control. There's no readable response codes that a script can trap to know that, yes, I really did select Alan Parsons. If another album got inserted without your knowing it, you may have just selected your wife's Abba collection (urgh!)

Nonetheless, I'd definitely recommend looking into it. http://fvgestel.dyndns.org/receiver . Basically, you've got to make some changes to the .arf file as distributed by SonicBlue, and you can't do that with simply WinZip. There's a tweak program (http://www.norman.cx/receiver/receiver-tweaker.asp), but it only lets you change the kernel -- you'll need to add more to it than just that one file. Search on the forum here for tips or tricks for modifying the .arf file (we can't simply distribute updated copies of it because of the copyrighted code within it).

Good luck!