(2014-06-08, 21:18)desepticon Wrote: Why even shutdown the mini (or even quit XBMC)? I keep mine on for months at a time. It uses very little power. Perhaps your needs differ but I need mine on to run rTorrent, Couchpotato, Sickbeard, SABnzbX and Plex Media Server among other things. My mini is a dedicated entertainment box/server/streamer and must be on at all times to function properly.

For those times it actually needs to be rebooted or shutdown I just do it over ssh. Or you could just use screen sharing if you want to do it through the GUI.

OS X is generally very stable and Minis are very power friendly so no real need to do shutdowns often.

(2014-06-08, 22:27)desepticon Wrote: If you turn verbose boot on with

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

then do a reboot you can see which processes are hanging on shutdown. I'm not sure how XBMC calls shutdown but the issue is probably some kind of timeout error.

Turn off verbose boot with

sudo nvram boot-args=

If you can't figure that out you could map a shutdown script to a button if your remote supports it.
Something like:

#!/bin/bash
killall -9 XBMC
sudo shutdown -h now

To make it not need a password use the NOPASSWD option in the /etc/sudoers file. You'll want a line in there like:

<username> ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/shutdown

Or an bash/applescript:

#!/bin/bash
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'shut down' -e 'end tell'