Trying to understand the various driver options regarding intel

[Chad]

Hello,

I've been wanting to do some Intel testing for a while, and finally
got a board I liked and have Gentoo up and running.  I'm reading the
various threads out there on the chip (btw it's an Asus P5E-VM HDMI
with the G35 chipset) and am becoming more confused rather than
clearing things up.  So here I go:

The board will be dedicated to playing back digital progamming (HDTV,
Blu-Ray, etc).  So, HDMI is probably my main concern, and getting
video fast enough to let other things happen (MythTV so comm flagging,
transcoding, etc) without messing with the video is a goal.  I've been
eyeballing the XvMC branch, (and yes I realize it's not for
production, I'm mainly interested in "possible" rather than "actual"
right now) but have also seen this:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi (The VAAPI page).
Maybe the XvMC branch is just to get some code together that works and
then dump it into the vaapi stuff, and if so, that makes more sense.
Otherwise, it seems like maybe some people are not reinventing the
wheel, but rather inventing 2 or 3 wheels at once to see which one is
going to roll the best.

Can anyone help a confused person out?  :)  Also, when compiling from
GIT are we supposed to pull down DRM, Mesa and the Intel stuff, or
just the Intel stuff?  Is the DRM and Mesa stuff in Gentoo Portage
"new"?

Thanks!

-Chad