A recent twitter post by Leo Laporte got me thinking about AppleTV as an addition to my AV system. He referenced and AppleTV hack called ATV. It appears to be a re-packaging of several AppleTV hacks into an easy to install package.
The most interesting of the hacks is NitoTV a hack that uses mplayer to allow you to play all types of video and you it can read a library of DVD iso's - there's the HD based version of my DVD library I've been looking for.
The problem with ATV for me is that I don't have a Mac and ATV requires a Mac for install.
However, the hacks that are part of ATV can be installed separately and I've found references to creating AppleTV patchsticks on a PC. I haven't owned a Mac since 1985. I may be headed to Mac ownership again but I'm going to try and avoid that.
I've decided to try the AppleTV. Refurbished 160Gb AppleTV's are going for $279 on the Apple web site and with no subscription fee, it's not too expensive of an experiment.