Recently I did good hack with VDR and streamdev-server. I added a possibility to preprocess LiveTV stream before streaming it via LAN. I wrote a simple howto “Prepare LiveTV for a limited bandwith howto”. So, hope it’ll useful for you and save your time.
I’ve written my first howto - VDR streamdev on 64bit Fedora Core 4 howto for project ‘Smarthome’. I’m goind to add another howto “How to setup CISCO 7970 in Plutohome” next week.
If you are owner of Sky Digibox you can easily add PVR functionality to it using VDR and its plugin sky. The plugin sky is included into official VDR distribution. You can find it in the PLUGINS/src. It creates a new MPEG2-based device which allows to connect the analog a/v output of your Sky Digibox to VDR. So, you’ll able to use the full recording flexibility of VDR with your Sky subscription.
The Digibox is remotely controlled through VDR via LIRC (see lircd.conf.sky, which contains the remote control codes for that). In order to access the Sky channels VDR needs to know the channel number under which each channel is stored in the Sky Digibox. These numbers are used as ‘frequency’ parameters in the channels.conf definitions of the Sky channels (see the file ‘channels.conf.sky’).
The Sky EPG is available on the Internet at Ananova.com. The Perl script getskyepg.pl extracts the EPG data from these pages
and sends it to VDR via an SVDRP connection.
This is a good example of flexibility of VDR. You can build not only simple PVR but combine VDR with existing satellite TV systems to extend their functionality.
Written by: Klaus Schmidinger
Project’s homepage: www.cadsoft.de/vdr
Latest version available at: www.cadsoft.de/vdr
Debian package availabe here.
To get some idea about VDR hardware have a look this forum topic. It’s on German but if you cannot read it (me too :)) you the pictures might tell you all details. This guy did incredible work. Maybe it’d be easier to buy some stock-produced case instead 
I talked about possibility to build PVR from PC. So, it’s time to say how to install VDR. It can be done by many ways (sounds like Perl slogan):
Personally I installed VDR from RPMs. In my mind it’s the best way if you’d like to have VDR on your PC where is already installed Lunix. it’s easy to update and maintain RPM installed applications IMHO. Also, there are availabe RPMs for several VDR plugins as well in the Linva.org repository. But to install a plugin which doesn’t packaged yet you should have VDR source.