Mac mini OSX + XBMC Vs Acer Revo + Live?
#1
Question 
I have an acer revo 3610 and am currently thinking about moving it to the living room, at first I looked at the new acer revo as a replacment but I then thought, what about a mac mini? Anyone here running XBMC Dharma on a mac mini? How well does it run? Is the performance better or worst than running it on an ION platform with Live? Also it is possible to have optical out through USB on a mac mini with full HD DTS or Dolby Audio?
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#2
Where a Mini rocks is not XBMC. A Mini rocks if you want to watch tons of streaming sites (Hulu, Netflix, etc) outside XBMC. It has enough CPU power in its small form factor to brute force its way through any of those sites. Honestly though I personally think if that is your thing you need to consider Plex as well (which is pretty much just for minis).

Where a Revo rocks is to be a XBMC appliance with XBMC Live. For playing back HD local content it will be superior to the Mini with OSX as OSX lacks frame rate matching (so no true 24p support), has less mature x264 GPU based decoding than Linux, and will boot straight to a consistent interface that is so slick all together that friends and family will swear you bought the thing from Best Buy (aka its like a TiVo).

I think both can output 8 channel PCM audio, but personally I have only tried that in Linux with my ION box.

If you don't want the streaming sites, then a ION box plus a nice SSD will have a smoother XBMC interface than a Mac Mini with its ancient HD. I know because my quad core machine (with its OS running of a normal HD) has a much less smooth XBMC interface than my ION box with SSD, and my quad core machine would eat a Mini for breakfast when it comes to raw speed.

Hope I helped...

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#3
Thanks for the input, guess I will stick with my revo 3610 and wait for the 3700 to see how that turns out before I start moving things.
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Mac mini OSX + XBMC Vs Acer Revo + Live?0