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So I fergot about this for a long while, last I checked in it was buggy as hell and barely starting let alone working well. Well I moved my wife's system into a room next to the home theater room and a set of cables came in on Friday from the fellas at Blue jeans, one being a 50 foot HDMI, the other a 50 foot toslink. I pluged them in, ran them through the ceiling and across the room to the pre/pro and started messing with highdef playback using VLC< perian on Quicktime, etc and they all sucked, at some point they'd lag or chop up or just drop playback. This is a 2.4ghz 4gb Imac, using a 4 terabytes of firewire 800 from lacie for storage - 24" btw. So anyway, I visited http://dn-0.com/xbmc-trac/ and it's very much working now. I'm very close to chucking my old 1.3 Xbox that's done nothing but run XBMC for the last several years. 1080p playback is flawless accross the board. External display driving on my 50" Kuro is perfect, DTS, DD passthrough works great format support as well, forwards backwards it's just like XBMC only i'm using the little mac remote atm.

If you're looking at a near perfect media center, XMBC on the mac is it. I guess the 1.8ghz mac mini's with 2gb ram are playing 1080p content just fine, as a fyi.

Its a nice find. Lifehacker showed this sometime ago. I like it alot.

http://lifehacker.com/389217/xbmc-turns ... dia-center

Hmm interesting......So ok I dont know about XMBC so what is it really? Do you just rip DVD's to it? Can you use like a tivo? What else can it be used for?

XBMC is what FrontRow should be - it's a front-end to your media library and media player, basically.

XBMC is a free open source (GPL) multimedia player for the Xbox™ from Microsoft. Currently XBMC can be used to play/view most common video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, MP3, AAC, JPG, GIF plus many more less known formats directly from a CD/DVD in Xbox DVD-ROM drive or of Xbox hard-drive, XBMC can also stream files from a PC over a local network and even stream media streams directly from the internet. XBMC has playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast and many audio visualizations. All these features enable the Xbox™ running XBMC to fully function as a multimedia jukebox.

XBMC is easy to install and use, it's very convenient and flexible plus offers a great price/performance ratio. XBMC is of course also completely free of any adware or spyware. (This, The XBMC Project is also known as "XBMC Media Center" or simply "XBMC").

Note! XBMC is a hobby project that is only developed by volunteers in their spare-time for free. (Remember that XBMC does require a modded Xbox to run on or it will not function).

http://xbmc.org/about/

derFunkenstein wrote:

XBMC is what FrontRow should be - it's a front-end to your media library and media player, basically.

The current build of XBMC is very good and I am using it on my HDTV equipped Mac mini. Having said that it is not what Front Row should be. The beauty of Front Row is its simplicity. Sometimes less is more (except for its codec support - thank you Perian).

Front row is a great product for people wanting to keep hooked into the .mac/itunes way of things. If not, XMBC is the solution to everything. I'm actually watching some Formula 1 1080 mkv's on through my imac on my Kuro and it looks **** good.

Yep, XBMC for mac has gotten to the point where it's more then usable on a day to day basis. There are still some bugs here and there but nothing too major.

I still have my XBOX XBMC running like a champ but the lack of 1080P playback is really making me consider a Mac Mini.

I'm also checking out how the Apple TV + hacks/Perian looks as i kinda like the simple interface it has.

Later on in July, i'll decide which way to go : Apple TV + hacks or a Mac Mini + XBMC

I'll let you guys know how it pans out,

Adi