For all the effort (and money) put into making a media server as quiet as possible (which is still not silent), I think you're way further ahead to just not put the server in your living room. Instead, put it in the basement/closet/garage/utility room -- somewhere you won't hear it. Then, broadly speaking, you have three options:
A commercial box, like NVidia shield, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire stick or AppleTV. This is by far the easiest as you get a remote, a "10 foot user interface" and they work with online services like Youtube, Netflix, etc. If you care about everything being open source software this obviously isn't a good option.
You can also DIY your own box on a Raspberry Pi. Be prepared to do lots of tinkering, though.
The other option is to get the media server's UI remotely. Long HDMI cable, HDMI-over-cat5 or wireless HDMI gets audio/video; some of those also do USB, or you can do wireless control if it's close enough. Almost as much tinkering as a Raspberry Pi, but could be cheaper if it's not far.
Another big benefit of the first two options is it scales to multiple clients, if you have more than one TV.
A commercial box, like NVidia shield, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire stick or AppleTV. This is by far the easiest as you get a remote, a "10 foot user interface" and they work with online services like Youtube, Netflix, etc. If you care about everything being open source software this obviously isn't a good option.
You can also DIY your own box on a Raspberry Pi. Be prepared to do lots of tinkering, though.
The other option is to get the media server's UI remotely. Long HDMI cable, HDMI-over-cat5 or wireless HDMI gets audio/video; some of those also do USB, or you can do wireless control if it's close enough. Almost as much tinkering as a Raspberry Pi, but could be cheaper if it's not far.
Another big benefit of the first two options is it scales to multiple clients, if you have more than one TV.