In reply to vincentvega:
What you need to do a bit of research on is DLNA. This is a subset of UPnP (Plug and Play) that has been developed for sharing media (video, music. pictures) around the home.
You need both a source (in this case your laptop with a media server running) and a destination - your TV. Go through your TV's menus to see if there's an option for accessing external content, it's not always obvious.
Assuming that your TV supports DLNA then the two devices need to be on the same network, you've identified that you may need a wireless adaptor but if the TV has an ethernet port then it may be better to use a homeplug (ethernet over mains cabling) as this will give higher throughput. If all goes well then you will be able to browse the contents of the laptop for videos, select one and it should play.
This is where it gets awkward! Depending on how you've encoded your video the TV may or may not be able to play it. For a device to become DLNA certified is fairly easy and not all devices support all formats. You'll just have to try things out. One way round this is "transcoding" which is basically on-the-fly translation between one encoding and another and usually done on the server by telling it which format you wish to use for each destination device.
If your TV doesn't support DLNA then you'll need something like the Raspberry Pi with a DLNA client running and connected to your TV via a HDMI cable.
Apple's AirTime is a similar but incompatible system. I.e. you need Apple kit at both ends
However you can get DLNA compatible media servers for the Mac so all is not lost.
If you've got lots of DVDs then it may be worth your while putting everything on a NAS drive on your network running a media server so that multiple devices can stream content and you aren't relying on your laptop being switched on.
Good luck!
ALC