[voip-ninja]

Even the i3 can't handle H265 if I understand previous comments in the Haswell NUC thread. H265 is years away from being something you are going to be playing on an HTPC in your living room... and when it does happen you are going to need new gear with hardware support for H265 baked in.

In future proofing an HTPC the most you can hope for is something that will play common formats for a couple of years reasonably well. Heck, current crop of NUCs + XBMC can't even handle 3D fully.

I'm not sure it's that far away. H265/HEVC is being broadcast on satellite in Europe as the preferred codec for 4k 2160/50p tests (earlier tests used 4 quarter screen h264 1080/50p streams that needed to be stitched) I'm not sure it's as far away as you think.

There are two test broadcasts at 4.8E and 19.2E : http://en.kingofsat.net/find.php?questio...Submit=Zap (Not sure if these are 4k or HD, and there have been some Eutelsat 4k HEVC tests as well)

Some SoC vendors are adding HEVC/H265 support already - I wouldn't be surprised to see GPU acceleration (either through H265 support or GPU compute) appearing pretty quickly on platforms that support it. H265/HEVC is definitely on the way - both for 4K content and to increase the efficiency of HD compression on newer platforms. (Just as H264 has started to replace MPEG2 for SD)

(I've been playing with 1080/50p and 2160/50p compression recently - using the SVT and EBU uncompressed clips as sources. The SVT stuff is available at 48bit depth - 16 bit linear RGB - at 2160/50p. It was shot on 65mm film about 10 years ago, though the film transfer was less than 16 bits, but used log quantisation not linear)

Well this is getting off topic, isn't it? This thread is about a $150 box that most certainly will not play H265 in any shape or form. We can debate all week long "how soon" before we will desire to have H265 support on HTPC in the living room, but doesn't do anyone buying a NUC any good, does it? Personally I believe that optical disc will be close to extinct by the time H265 really gains a foothold in the home media distribution market.... and since I buy all of my content instead of pirating it, I probably won't have an HTPC at that point other than to play stuff I've already ripped.