iTunes movie and music sharing advice ...

OK, I need some adavice from some of you itunes experts out there.

First, let me explain my setup by going room to room.

Home Office: Airport Extreme, sitting next to an Intel Dial Core Mac Mini. Mac Mini has an external 1TB hard drive with my music and tons of movies.

Living room: Plasma flat screen. Will eventually have an appleTV or mac mini connected to it. Currently I use one of my two Macbooks to connect to the TV if I want to play a movie.

Bedroom: LCD flat screen TV. Like the living room, will eventually have an apple tv or a mac mini, but right now I use one of my laptops.

All computers are running OSX 10.5.8 and iTunes 9.

Here's what I want to do:

I want to quickly browse my movies and music (movies more important) from any one of the TVs
I would prefer to use a remote, like the Apple Remote or a programmable one from Logitech, to browse through the movies. With two kids under 5, the last thing I want in the living room is a wireless keyboard and mouse that they will easily destroy.
I would like to browse the movies according to categories (comedy, drama, TV shows) instead of a big long alphabetical list (alphabetical lists are a pain when you have complete TV series collections like 24 or Curb Your Enthusiasm, shows that might have 100 episodes. Scrolling through them is a big PITA).
I want to maintain a centralized library of my media, and not have copies of movies and music sitting on different computers. That's why I have it all on the Mac Mini in my office. This makes it easier for me to do a backup or to add movies I have ripped from my DVD collection somewhere else (copying 30 gb across wireless takes too long)


So far, Front Row has been a bit of a disappointment. Browsing a shared collection is klugy, and requires me to put an alias in the movie folder on each machine. BAlso I have not noticed any way to browse movies by their categories/genres.

So, what should I do? Will a product like Media Central, or Plex, do the trick? Or am I missing something about the new Home Sharing feature

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