this is what i've been doing (don't have an appletv): storing ripped movies on a network storage (my airport extreme is doing the serving, but i think a NAS or a serving computer would also work), have my old imac hooked up to my tv via DVI, create an alias of the location of the movies and put them into the imac's /home/movies folder, and i can access the movies via frontrow. not sure what you mean by coverflow, as far as i know there is no 10-foot interface of coverflow.
if you want to use your appletv, i suppose you can have you movies on your network storage, import them into itunes on your computer without copying the files, and stream from your computer to your apple tv.
note i'm compressing my dvds into a h.264 file, playable by quicktime. if you're justing ripping the dvds into Video_TS folders, you'll need a program like dvdassist for frontrow and probably some additional hacking for appletv.
