I’ve been avoiding posting the various bits of Apple TV news over the past few days, as it’s mostly just “Apple TV is shipping” and “Apple TV reviews are out.”

However, there’s some big news today. Someone has done some digging into what’s on the harddrive in the Apple TV and found that it’s an OSX derivative that will run normal intel binaries. Here’s the duggmirror copy of the original Something Awful post. I suppose it’s possible that this is a fake, but I’m not so sure.

The gist is that they pulled the drive, mounted it on a mac, installed Perian and Dropbear, put it back together, and now are able to playback previously unsupported video file formats. So, the Apple TV runs a stripped down OS X with a functional version of Quicktime. It may be worth picking one up just to play with, even though I don’t have a TV …