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Is there something special about the hard drive or could a generic drive be substituted and the original stored should warranty service be needed?

Nothing special about the harddrive at all. The one in mine is a Fujitsu MHW2040A: a 2.5" 40GB drive with 44-pin ATA interface.

What video formats does the Myth setup support on that platform?

Any formats that MythTV normally supports. lavc, x264, xvid, divx, mpeg2 are all faultless at SD resolutions.  I haven't tested any HD media, it may be possible.

[removing the harddrive]

Related to getting AppleTV to run as a media director:

I have a MythTV frontend running on a minimal Debian etch installation on my AppleTV.

Currently, the major stumbling block to having a Linux distro automagically install is that the firmware on the AppleTV will only load Apple-signed bootloaders.

To get Linux installed, or have LinuxMCE netboot it, requires installing a secondary bootloader (the one from MysticBeasts).

This can be done by either:

• removing the harddrive from the AppleTV, mounting it on another machine and installing everything
• forcing the AppleTV to boot off a USB stick - requiring that you have a copy of the proprietary Apple bootloader on your USB stick already

The first option voids the warranty and doesn't qualify as "automagically installing", and the second involves a non-distributable Apple binary.

Would it be possible just to remove the HDD (or just format it and use it for general storage) and have it network boot?

Short answer: yes, kinda.

Removing the HDD is about the only way to install Linux on AppleTV.
If you happen to already have a copy of the (proprietary) Apple binary bootloader that is present on the AppleTV HDD, you can make a bootable USB drive and do it without voiding the warranty.

The onboard IR receiver works well enough (the only remote I can get working is the Apple remote). Analog and optical audio work. HDMI, Component and (yes) Composite video output and XvMC work with proprietary nVidia drivers.

Edit: removed garbage