Well, like it or not, Vista MCE has codec support galore, PVR support etc. etc.
Has anyone looked into loading Vista Home Premium or Ultimate???

Well i'm not sure it's that obvious. Modding/hacking the AppleTV is easier because it's running an OS that is specialized for it's hardware and that is pretty much 10.4.7. Installing Vista, I think, could be hard
1- Because it has EFI
2- because the thing wouldn't know what to do with the hdmi port (and this is speculation)
We first need to learn more about how the device boots and can be manipulated (USB, etc).

Remember the famous contest to run XP on the Intel Mac? I wonder if someone should start a similar contest?

what would be the point? MythTV would slaughter it hands down and run better too. Also linux can handle EFI

The Market would decide who would slaughter who. EFI didn't stop the XP on Intel Mac effort. If at all feasible, I bet someone will do it, if only to show it can be done.

No need for linux, you could possibly install MythTV on the Apple TV version of OSX, with less trouble

Sorry I really do not care about apple's OS that is not supporting hardware acceleration such as XVMC I would much rather run linux on their hardware. I am betting it can be done too. Sure OSX is nice and all but why worry about it? I would have no use for anything it can offer only what linux can offer as my media center is mythtv, records via firewire and hauppauge. Not to mention its all in raid arrays to preserve the data

Sure the Mac Acceleration that nigel is doing for mythfrontend might be interesting once its working but meh. I would rather have a extremely low overhead of linux built for one purpose or many purposes whatever the case. Gentoo + AppleTV + MythTV vs OS X gimpified

Not to start a flame war I intend to use it for this purpose I just need to get my hands on a AppleTV, But the work done to get the other formats going as well as Firefox are impressive

SlicerDicer, you do make a good point...an Apple TV hardware/MythTV/Linux box built for one purpose only as a Media player. It would be cost effective too. Yes, I'm coming around to the Linux way of thinking on this one.

I am wondering if I could get a superslim DVD player and USB external it. That would be cool And the DVD player could be mostly hidden.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16827154034

That would look slick underneath it actually

Couldnt we just install bootcamp on it? The same files work on all macs so it would make appletv able to boot windows

yes but why would Apple (Intel) equip the EFI chip with BIOS emulation?