Home Theater thoughts

After some thought, confusion, revelations and then more thinking, I have decided I need to organize, and better utilize my music and video collection.
I am in the process of ripping all the DVDs I own and storing the images on my NAS box. Now any computer on the network can navigate to the share where they are stored and start watching any title they double click on. That's handy, but I ned more. I need to blur the distinction between my computer network, and my TV, a modest 32" Vizio HD720p.
Apparently the "need" I just recently realized I had is something the rest of the world, Micrsoft included realized years ago. Hence, Windows Media Center, MythTV, Tivo and other such beasts. More specificlaly, what I need is a network streaming, multimedia home entertainment center, with secondary capabilities of a Digital video recorder.
Since Cable, Dish, or Satalite service is not in my near future, I mainly want to be able to call up and view, movies and music from my own collection of ripped CD's and DVD's. Preferably with a remote. A Media Extender is basically what this would be. A bridge, if you will, that lets my TV display what the extender sends it from what it can find on my network.
"Tivo" functionality that most of us are familiar with, requires a tuner, that actually picks up the signal, cable, antenna or whatever and allows live recording of that incoming signal. Even tough these capabilities would not be very useful for me now, as I only get about 5 channels.
More research is needed, but the days of popping in DVD's to watch a movie are numbered.