Capture stream from cable box via FireWire

[jackal]

No response to my reply to this post on the Linux forum, so I'm posting here (this is probably the better place, anyway).

I'd like to have VLC capture the MPEG-2 transport stream from my cable box's FireWire port, transcode it, and stream it so I can watch live TV while I'm away from home. I can already do the latter two by opening a saved TS file (captured by either iRecord or AVCVideoCapture from the FireWire SDK)--but I want to do it live. (Yes, I know I can open the currently-recording .m2t file and stream that but I'd prefer not to have my hard drive fill up after a couple of hours.)

The post linked above seemed to indicate that--at least maybe on the Linux platform--libraries and access modules exist that would enable this to work. How about on the Mac?

A bonus: it'd be helpful to be able to change channels while watching the stream (iRecord and AVCVideoCapture both support this, but how to implement that over a stream, I don't know--at the very least, maybe someone can help me figure out some sort of AppleScript that I could trigger remotely via an ssh session or something).