I just re-read that bit. Too bad for the Tivo thing.

Pre-loading a bunch of video and then presenting him with that list? Yeah, that sounds like an Apple TV or one of the other streaming boxes, and you just put all the videos on the computer's hard disk on the LAN. The streaming box presents him with a pretty menu of the videos available on the LAN.

The process of capturing the videos on to the computer, well, that's the problem: Everything on Netflix or Amazon or whatnot is copy-protected and DRM locked. Meaning that it's not as simple as just DVR'ing it. Nominally, you can only stream them, not save them to your hard disk. You'd have to go through the process of capturing the video file and stripping the DRM out of it so that you can keep it on your hard disk and play it back whenever you like. Complicated and time consuming. Or, of course, flat-out pirating all your video content from torrent sites outright. Other than that, you're back to the original user interfaces from the streaming sites, which you said would be too much for him.

Man, it's really too bad Tivo isn't available there, because that really would do what you want. When you select a movie on Amazon Prime, it shows up in the 'Now Playing' list like any other TV show. It's exactly what you were asking for. Sigh.