Albatross, formerly TyStreamer, is a proxy server which pulls programs from your TiVo or your computer’s hard drive and re-streams them to the client at a lower bit-rate so that it can be viewed in real-time over the internet. It does this by using VideoLAN Client to re-encode the video in real-time and stream it to the client as Flash Video. TyStreamer has been tested on Mac OS X 10.5 Intel (Leopard) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

UPDATE: This project has been retired. As fun as it was, it was never stable enough for regular use, and VLC is changing (for the better) at a pace that breaks compatibility with Albatross faster than I can update it, and I have retired my original Series 1 TiVo which started the whole project. Also, the Plex Media Server and it’s multiple clients are much better at streaming content than Albatross ever was, and has a much larger team working on it. While it doesn’t stream directly from your TiVo, it works great with content on your computer. Perhaps someday I’ll make a plugin for Plex that will allow you to stream unprotected content from your TiVo, but that project is for another day.