himedia's xbmc performance is unique, only himedia sellers and experts can answer that - becos the chipset is not on the xbmc supported list. best u contact your seller.

anyway, i never understood why users prefer to playback with xbmc and not direct with the native mediacenter provided and is good.

to all himedia users, take note the old generic xbmc versions (dwnld from xbmc site, incl and up to frodo 12.3) do not work very well - 720/1080 lagging, timeout, crashing. only with the use of advancedsettings.xml or the customised xbmc hiplayer 12.2 version will it work reasonably well, but some users have difficulty doing it.

now, good news! all that is history. all you need to do now is to delete any old xbmc version and install the latest xbmc 13.1 gotham, android/arm version from:
http://xbmc.org/download/

and follow this instruction from juniper:
i hv used gotham 13.1 now for >1 week, all good.

any xbmc issues/questions about himedia, best to check and ask here in this himedia thread as they are himedia specific:
https://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1849024/+900
note: this post is only relevant to himedia devices, irrelevant to other devices.

i installed Gotham on my Himedia Q5 ii...after awhile it cant be open..it's exited when i launched it...i am using supe repo wizard..

It appears the Minix X8-H doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet. As for lan movie steaming, It'll really depend on the video file you are streaming, cache size and the player type you are using. My external hard drive was usually directly plugged into my Neo X7 then, though I tested streaming from my pc (wireless) to the box(Ethernet). 720P & 1080P mkv/mp4 files, about 10GB in size had zero lags from start till finish. Lags started occurring when I tried streaming a 30GB+ videos. It'll buffer, play for a few minutes (can't remember exactly how long, but enough to drive me mad) then buffer again. But then, that was my experience on the X7. The X8-H is supposed to be better.

Edit: USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet on the MXIII. Should work on the X8-H as well since it requires no special drivers.

You need to have a card which can take video feed, though i think with Astro it's difficult to get the direct feed, cuz Astro channels depending on decoder and smart card... so a normal TV tuner card may not work for Astro feed.