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The first day after Apple TV began shipping a bunch of sharp-as-a-tack
coder types hacked Apple's new set top box to shreds:
Non-Apple TV owners can enjoy the out of box experience by viewing the
opening video which one crafty person ripped from the hard drive and
posted in all of it's 720p glory. You can also download the Quartz
Composer Screen Saver and the Now Playing Screen. And if you're truly
hard-core you can download the entire Apple TV OS, and (conceivably)
install it on another Mac.
But this is just scratching the Apple TV surface.
True hackers will want to immediately take it apart (photos) and
upgrade the wimpy 40GB HDD to 80 or 120GB - it's a standard 2.5-inch
notebook mechanism (another HDD upgrade tutorial is here).
If you really want to hack it to the next level you can play Xvid
movies on Apple TV, but it ain't pretty and involves removing the HDD
(covered above) and un-breaking SSH (using Perian and DropBear) so you
can access the Apple TV remotely.
If that's too much hassle for you there's a solution to automatically
convert Xvid, Divx, WMV files to Apple TV format, and then import them
into iTunes with a convenient Automator workflow.
You can even turn a Mac mini into an Apple TV or an Apple TV into a
Web server (by installing Apache).
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