I've been a vdr user since ~2005, so about 6 years. For all of that I've used a generic build of Fedora with VDR installed (along with a raft of plugins and XMBC).
With the supposed simplicity of yavdr, built in yavdrweb, VDR Live and nvidia vdpau support, I thought I'd give yavdr a go.
First impressions.
* installation on new hardware (cheap motherboard, HDMI card etc) was very straightforward.
* no problems (apart from getting used to Ubuntu, having come from Fedora!) getting the basic 3x IPTV channels up and working
* pretty quickly had all my old VDR recordings working, remote control (through an Android VDR app), music, picture and video collections and DVD playing
* the web portal provides easy access to configure most basic things; hdmi audio, front end selection, remote control, streaming etc
* the "templates" you have to use to update .conf files, grub files etc took some getting used to - but it's a pretty clean way of managing your customizations
* out-of-the-box the vdpau runs great. CPU is at 0.5%, where my native VDR system ran at 15-20% cpu
Things still to work out how to do
* get remote keys working on xbmc
Things still causing frustration!!
* I have some customizations I need on VDR source code - how do I a)download vdr sources b)integrated these into yavdr
* it seems every time I try and do some fairly normal Ubuntu tasks, like updating packages, kernels etc, I break yavdr and need to re-install yavdr
any other english people out there going through the same challenges as me?