Several short comments:
I would recommend using vdr 1.7.10 for now. 1.7.14 does segfault for me and some other people i know. I'm still trying to nail down what we're doing in common but haven't found out yet. There is no huge feature that's missing in vdr 1.7.10 and when you're new to vdr you shouldn't start with a headbanger
On some note here someone mentioned that vdr is not able to skip commercials, thats partially wrong. There are two competing plugins or extensions easily intergrateable to vdr called markad and noad which are able to scan records for commercials and put cut marks into them. You're able to jump between the marks with your remote and move them, some more keys and vdr puts out a final cutted recording.
Someone also mentioned the possibility to do transcoding with mythtv. vdr has the yacoto and burn extensions. both aren't absolutely perfect but they might do what you want.
Another post mentioned the myth web frontend. You can get a easy and nice web frontend vor vdr by installing either the live plugin, vdradmin-am or the xxv plugin.
As a last thing someone also mentioned the myth frontend beeing a relict from 5 years in the past. That's mostly true for vdr, too. vdr was originally designed for use with dvb full featured cards which produce their own video out signal and have very limited capabilities for an osd. This changed to quite some extent in the near past, but it's still not up to par to the beauty of xbmc.
vdr integrates nicely into xbmc in the current state of the xbmc pvr-testing2 branch. You can't get everything out of the vdr features from xbmc but that's the same for every tv backend right now. It's worth giving it a try.
Good Luck
Hibbelharry