NFS is a rock solid protocol IMHO, i have tons of NFS shares on multiple platforms all run as fast as network. Unfortunate that XMBC cannot deal with it. I am sure there are advanced options that could be set on the share to get it to play nice with XMBC but i am unfamiliar with this program and you would be better trawling through their forums.

I'm retired, so I have a lot of time on my hands. Over the last week I've spent many hours, every single day, trying to solve the Lion/SMB/XBMC problem. So far, it's been a total wash.

I had high hopes for NFS, but I didn't realize that the XBMC developers had only recently introduced that protocol. I wasted many hours trying to tweak my configuration to allow XBMC clients to connect, but it wasn't until new builds were released that I could make that happen. Of course, that ended up being futile because the NFS client on XBMC is too slow for video streaming.

I have an NAS device that does SMB, so for a while I thought I'd use that. Trouble is, Lion will probably not connect to that device, so getting media files to it will also be an unsurmountable problem.

My final hope was to figure out how to install SAMBA on a Mac from MacPorts and make it work. That three day effort has also resulted in total failure.

The bottom line is that if I install Lion I lose my home entertainment network.

I'm sure that someone younger and smarter than I could figure it out. But, as for me, a week of failure has yielded nothing more than an increase in Happy Hour alcohol consumption. In fact, time for another whiskey and soda.

I am pretty sure you could transfer the files from Mini to NAS using FTP.
On NAS enable FTP and use something like Cyberduck to connect to NAS and transfer files. Obviously once this is done add NAS to the sources in XMBC.

The whole Samba thing is a pain but on the other side of the coin it is joyous for business setups to see SMB2 on OS X Lion. And as far as running multiple versions etc is a very advanced setup IMO and lots of things to get spot on for it to work.

If you look on the Boxee and XBMC forums, you'll see that many people have gotten this to work. They install SAMBA3 from MacPorts, turn off Windows sharing in the Sharing panel and, BINGO!, it works. No mention at all of any of the problems I've had and no mention at all of conflicts with the native Snow Leopard version of SAMBA.

The instructions people are using are here:

OSX Lion Samba SMB shares broken – XBMC not working

I can't help but thinking that I've missed something in the smb.conf file, but it's very simple and nothing pops out.

The only clue I might have is this. When I look for the SAMBA3 config file, the result has double slashes in the path:

When I look for Apple's smb.conf, the path looks normal:

That path gets hard coded at compile time, so I wonder if there is a flaw in my compile?

Anyway, I'm stumped.