Hello,
our proposed system would consisted from backend and frontend.
Backend woud be VLC and http server running on your Linux server. Prototype I could develop on my machine, but playlist related features would require ssh access (non root enough) to Linux box and DreamBox available on LAN. For this part I already had similar project so I could reuse some code/ideas.
Frontend would be either web based either native app or probably silverlight based, we still need to double check that.
So contact me if you are interested. Regards, smukstaras