The AppleTV is actually quite open? Hah! All you have to do is take out the hard drive, install it in your intel mac, do some occult incantations and tada! your appletv is now “open”. Until you do a software update that is, when all your hacks will be wiped out. Pah!

For open, see http://www.neurostechnology.com/ which does everything my appletv does (albeit not as screen-lickingly slickly), but is truly open. It plays every format I’ve thrown at it, browses my network for media files and I can plug any size usb drive into the un-crippled usb port. And guess what, it actually uses the external drive for storage.