So I have had some time to actually fiddle with my AppleTV. I have actually opened mine up and modified it so that I can play all sorts of media formats, it is no longer restricted to just iTunes content.
When I modified my AppleTV I did not know there was a way to do so without having to open the unit. If you are not upgrading the drive and just want to make it so that you can install plug-ins your best bet is to read up on the patch-stick method. The one thing I feel I NEED to say and cannot STRESS enough is that before you do anything you make recovery images of the EFI and Recovery partitions. If you fail to make backups and something goes wrong your only option to fix your drive will be to borrow a friends AppleTV and get the partition images. I can tell you how much of a pain that is. The reason I suggest you use the patch-stick method is because you will not have to open your unit. The patch-stick is a one time operation once the system is patched you will not need the usb drive anymore.
When I was modifying mine I moved SSHD to the wrong directory then went to delete it and did ‘rm -rf /usr/bin/’. Can you say Woops! I attempted to recover the files from the 1.1 update that Apple released but was unable to do that. Somehow during the process the EFI partition of my drive became corrupt. I was left with a perfectly fine AppleTV unit without a hard drive that would boot the system. I had to borrow a friends AppleTV and make the images necessary to fix mine.
