[da-anda]

1. Check! http://cgit.freedesktop.org/vaapi/intel-driver/log/ (MVC decoding has just been commited in master).
2. No, we just need a player that supports MVC.
3. Check! Read my previous post about gstreamer.

Looks to me like I'll be playing MVC this summer

So if I'm ready this correctly, decoding for playback of MVC doesn't sound that far off.... at least with external players? Or is this being built into the codec that XBMC uses and if so, how long after going live would it take to be build in and supported by XBMC?

read again. Decoding is the missing piece, and this might still take a while until it has been implemented in to libav and been backported to ffmpeg. And only once it's in ffmpeg XBMC can make use of it.