[Daveatfernie]

Hi all,
I run xbmc on an apple tv2 and a win 7 pc, however I have just received an i7 mac mini and have installed xbmc. I thought that xbmc played all file types without needing seperate codecs to be installed. Is this the case?
I tried playing back a h264 720p mkv file and at first it struggled to launch then play it until i changed xbmc to the default program for them.

Finder struggled to show the preview also.

My videos have imported correctly and the format has been correctly detected but it does seem to making an issue out of files that run perfectly on my windows xbmc box.

Thanks in advance to my newbie mac question. It's my first mac and am feeling a bit dissolusioned so far.

[Ned Scott]

Install Perian for Mac OS X to get the movies showing up in preview/quickview (in the Finder).

As far as XBMC for Mac OS X goes, it should handle everything out of the box with no additional installation. An i7 Mac Mini should handle everything. my 2009 Macbook Pro with a core2duo can playback any 1080 video I throw at it. Are you having any issues once you are in XBMC itself to playback the videos?

If you don't need the XBMC 10-foot-interface then you can also use "MPlayer OS X Extended" (get that one specifically). It's a great basic player that will also play anything thrown at it, and is a bit easier to use as a 2-foot-interface player.

[Daveatfernie]

Hi ned,
I installed perian which has helped the preview pane. Thanks for this.

When I try to launch the videos in xbmc i get the blue spinner for a while then it tells me the video cannot be played. (again these work in windows xbmc).
When I added perian the thumbnails showed for .avi and .wmv but the mkv's are still blank.

I'd like to keep xbmc if possible as my display is a tv. The ten foot interface helps me see it accross the room :-)

Plex seems to play the files without bother for some reason. I have also made xbmc the default player for mkv files and if I open a file from finder, xbmc opens and the video plays in the background choppily while the main interface is shown over the top.

[Daveatfernie]

I've tried a couple more films (all h264 mkv's). Now perian is installed. I try to start the film and the blue spinner comes up. About 30 seconds later the small screen appears with curtains appears then about20 seconds later the movie starts full screen.
Some films go on to play correctly and others stop after 20 seconds or so (timer keeps ticking and sound can be heard but with a frozen picture)

Is my mac running without hardware acceleration as it is a new model?

I have the discrete ati graphics card 6630m.

I've hunted for the log file on osx but cant find it anywhere.

[davilla]

try opening videos from xbmc itself instead of using the finder. The i7 mac mini should have the ponies to handle everything. Also turn vda decoder off.

[Daveatfernie]

I have got my log at http://pastebin.com/uxuctQQA

I seem to have a lot of "could not find codec parameters"
There also seem to be a lot of DVD references. I have a mac air superdrive plugged in at the minute and am wondering if this is causing a problem.

I'm updating to a nightly build rather than the stable build, running without the drive plugged in and will update later.