A couple of years ago (it doesn’t seem that long ago…) I waxed lyrical about the advantages of using a modded Xbox with XBMC as a living room media adapter.

Unfortunately technology moves on and my trusty Xbox just didn’t have the horsepower to play back high definition content. The next gen consoles can do it but they still aren’t as flexible as I’d like (although kudos to Microsoft for finally enabling DivX playback on the 360).

So what do to? The Mac Mini stepped in to fill the gap nicely; the new Core Duo models are fairly powerful, it’s tiny and it’s almost silent running. It’s also surprisingly good value for money - I can’t build a PC that ticks all those boxes for the price of a mini.

It seems like the developers of the original XBMC software had the same thought and they’ve been porting the media player software to OSX. Over the past month or so I’ve been watching the OSXBMC project with interest and it looks like it’s finally become solid enough for general use.

XBMC (the Xbox Media Center) is a front end application for playing back video and music. Think Front Row++. Unlike Front Row it doesn’t force you to have your audio/video files in the iTunes managed folder structure, and it also plays back just about anything you can throw at it including .ISO/VOB and FLAC files.

Front row can do some of this with perian, but XBMC seems more efficient to me. In my testing it played 720p .MKV files from a LAN share with no dropped frames and can also handle 1080p content, although that’s pushing the mac to the limits of it’s ability. I’ve never been able to do either of these with Front Row/Perian.

Although I said it’s solid, it still has it’s roots very much in the Xbox world. That means that there are some menu items on the main interface that are just not applicable to the mac and others that behave slightly oddly. If you don’t mind a bit of experimentation though it’s well worth a look.

Get the software from here, and the FAQ here