try using Mediaserv. It autogenerates a webpage with your files in, and then launches tablet-encode to transcode the applications on-the-fly. when you click a recording it launches the stream in media player after a few seconds. I have it setup to show both my recordings, and videos. For the recordings it also pulls the metadata from the mythtv database.

I have not tried using it over a low speed link yet, but the encoding options for tablet-encode have various presets, so you will be able to reduce the quality and thus the amount of data transferred, which will give you more of a fighting chance.

what is your definition of a slow link. My bottleneck is the uplink from my router back to my ISP whihc is 256K currently.