I have been following the thread on Something Awful for a while and the AwkwardTV wiki. Now I could be completely wrong about this since I dont have an AppleTV yet and dont clam to be a UNIX master. But I had an idea on how to enable access to it without having to take it a part. Here it says that if you plug in a keyboard and hit CMD-S it will boot into single user mode, which if I am not mistaken is a command prompt. I do not however know what the limitations to single user mode are, will it let you run common unix commands such as mount, sudo, etc? So my whole theory could be completely off!

Could you from here do either:

A ) Disable the firewall and install SSH to gain remote access to the box? Since you need sshd from an Intel Mac you would need to copy it over somehow, if you could mount a network share then you might be able to copy it over.
Or
B ) Do A and go ahead and mount a network share containing the Perian files and copy them over?

I beleive that when you boot into single user mode it gives you read only access to / but this post says that you can gain RW access via SSH, would the same command work in single user mode?

Just thought I would throw it out there since unfortunately I don't have my own to mess around with yet.

Unfortunately, the keyboard commands only get you into single user mode. Once there, the keybord is inactive. The important thing is that this proves the usb port is active, not disabled.

Ahh well so much for that idea haha .

I doubt apple needs to open an aTV to enable the usb ports... So if we ever figure out if there is a button command or a special signal or whatever to enable them then this would work well.

This is all assuming that the Kernel even has support for a Keyboard and Mouse Human Input Device.

EFI has HID support, however hands that off when the kernel loads (not the initial bootstrapping process).

Cant we load anything over the Network via EFI/netboot?

Apple has to have a way for the genious bar to trouble shoot them (or to do some sort of restore). I bet it's doable.