I was considering building a mini-itx HTPC without case as it will be enclosed in a hidden (yet accessible) place in my apartment.

I will have no troubles with cooling, a huge dissipator and using the flow the PSU provides will be enough.

My main concerns are idle power and which software I should use.

I've been extensively reading about Hi10p and even have a Hi444p sample (usagi drop episode 3) working flawlessy with the Lav Cuvid+madvr+mpchc combo but only on a win7 box.

I've tried to see if I could modify a geexbox 2.0 live usb distro, which is quite a good basis. Thing is, the community seems to be dead or in a deep coma and I do not have sufficient skills to alter the linux and XBMC parts so that everything works fine and remains simple to use.

I do not wish to go atom+ion(2) or amd E350 routes as they do not have enough power for software+filter decoding.

But then, I'm faced with idle power consumption that can be quite high and base price that quickly goes around 500€ (without peripherals) when it really only is a media PC.

I wanted to go:
H67 mini-itx motherboard with HDMI out
I5 2500k
some ram 4GB would be fine, but 2 should be enough.
some big passive cooler
diskless
good PSU

It might be I'm just wanting too much power for the real needs. It's just I don't want to change this when a new format
arrives and I need more software decoding power.