[lmyllari]

I wonder what IR receiver chip it has (anyone know which?) and how hard it will be to setup with regular MCE over Linux +Lirc

Nuvoton. The only difficulty with it is that the BIOS claims it's not there. See http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1549255 for a workaround (for OpenELEC, but the idea is the same for other distros). Other than that it just works with OE, so it's probably pretty easy to get working elsewhere too.

Traditionally I am a Nvidia fan (Since MY XBMC's all on Linux, ION1 user and lovely it still is (buttery smooth playback), so it will have a great deal to prove this NUC. We shall see.

I am coming from an older nvidia system and I'm very impressed. There's no need to mess with custom modes, the gfx drivers pick up the CEA modes from EDID and set them up (including also 1000/1001 variants). Also, no binary drivers! (Never again if I can avoid them..)

VA-API has some issues compared to VDPAU, but it will probably get there soon (colorspace issues; advanced deinterlacing not yet stable). Hardware should be capable. There will be some nice things you can't do on nvidia, for example messing with infoframes (output full range, tell monitor it's limited range -> BtB, WtW, no banding and no need to do special monitor settings). Open drivers may enable some more interesting stuff in the future like higher bit depth processing/output, direct YCbCr output with no conversions etc..

Then there's power management.. On Intel I mean, I don't think Nvidia has heard of it yet