Apple TV plays DivX/Xvid

Barely out on the US street the Apple TV is winning friends and being happily hacked.

There are obligatory unmake disassembly photo-sets, with the best being the dissection and commentary at anandtech.com.

There are walkthroughs on how to supersize the hard disk inside of the Apple TV.

And then there are the approaches to getting Divx/Xdvid content playing on an Apple TV. There two basic angles, either transcode the xvid into a codec that the Apple TV can playback or arm the Apple TV with the codecs necessary to play xvid.
The hacks are coming thick and fast because the Apple TV is running a version of Mac OS X that naturally uses QuickTime as the media foundation. At the moment all but the transcode require disassembling the Apple TV - however all that’s needed is for someone to discover how to connect (ssh) into Apple TV for there to be a reasonably friendly method of watching divx/xvid on your TV.

Odds on… by the time Apple TV gets into NZ shops this will have happened.

Updated: Awkward TV is a wiki pulling together a great collection Apple TV resources.