Home Threatre Setup

As most guys do, I like to tinker with gadgets. However my newest project is seeming to be a bit of a head-scratcher. Maybe you guys can help me out with it.

Ultimately, as an end result I would like to be able to load all my DVD's onto my computer along side my music library. The goal of this is to store all forms of entertainment media onto one, easily searchable, easily maintainable, source (e.g. my computer). This is easy enough to do considering I can simply rip all my movies using a ripping program, so getting the movies onto my computer isn't my concern, and naturally getting music onto my computer in this day and age shouldn't be any big mystery either.

My concern is that, with all my media in one spot, I would like to be able to double-click on a movie on my computer and have it play on my television. Along the same idea I would also like to double click on a music playlist and have that play over my stereo. The problem is that the computer that I would like to house all this media is in my home office and my television set and stereo are in my living room.

This is a problem. I can easily connect my television as a second monitor using the right gadgets and I can very easily connect my stereo to my computer, but that's not the problem at hand. The television needs to not only be independent of the computer, but in an entirely different room. It also needs to be able to act entirely like a TV should so that if a guest comes to stay they can just turn it on and start watching cable TV. Also when TVs are connected as second monitors they often lose the quality of picture and this is not a fair sacrifice.

I do have a partial solution. I have an old computer that was built right before XP came out (yes, that's an old computer - who's feeling the gray hairs poke through). I can put that computer in the living room and connect it to my network. Then I can go onto my office computer (the one with all my movies and songs) and share the directory that holds all the media. This will allow me to go onto the living room computer and access the movies/songs over the network. After that, I just have to get the movie to output to one of the audio/video ports on the back of the television set computer. Then I can probably just do something similar for my music.

But alas, there's more...

The living room computer still resides on a desk that is far away from the television. To avoid having wires go all over my living room, I would also like to figure out a way to do all of this wirelessly.


...Any thougts???