Tell them, my song.

Austin Seraphin’s blog “Behind the curtain” (http://behindthecurtain.us) had the solution for a problem that I’ve been fiddling with for the last couple of days. I bought a Zotac Zbox to use it has a media player in our new house.
First, it took me a while to find out that Xbmc (with activated VPDAU) and mplayer are apparently the only video players on Ubuntu 12.04 that can take advantage of nVidia’s ION chips and can play MKV files without stuttering.
On Ubuntu, you have to run this command to install the software required for GPU accelerated video playback:

sudo apt-get install libva1 vdpau-va-driver vainfo

Now comes the next, more difficult problem: In OS X Lion, Apple dumped good old Samba and exchanged it with SMBX. While that works well enough for Windows clients, Ubuntu fails to connect properly to Windows shares on the Mac.
The solution is to use sshfs instead:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

On your Mac, enable “Remote Login” in “Sharing” in the System Preferences. Select the user accounts that you want to use for ssh logins.
Now add a host entry for your Mac to /etc/hosts on your Ubuntu machine, for example:

192.168.1.99 mac

Now you can mount any OS X directory that you like with

sshfs macuser@mac:/macuserdirectory /targetfolder

sshfs will ask you for a password. That is the password for the OS X user account.
With the command

fusermount -u /targetfolder

you will unmount the directory again.
If you want to automatically mount the Lion shares when you login, write a little script that looks like this and add it to your “startup applications” in Ubunut (search for that program in Unity).

echo macuserpassword | sshfs macuser@mac:/macuserdirectory /targetdirectory -o password_stdin

Make the script executable with

chmod +x scriptname.

Enjoy and good luck!