Just wanted to announce that I have put my personal VDR+Media player into a package at openSUSE build service.
It is not intended to be "nice", but rather functional and maximally simplistic -- it just works. The frontend uses gnome-terminal+iselect and couldn't be easier to script (in bash).
It runs on Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 (x86_64).
If someone intends to extend/improve on it, please use the openSUSE build service branch functionality.