A couple of times I have seen the vdr message ERROR: video data stream broken which (a) leads to a vdr exit, and (b) keeps happening every time I re-launch vdr. As far as I can tell, this occurs if a recording gets scheduled on a channel that is (subsequently) deleted or otherwise unavailable (e.g blocked with the very nice 'taste' plugin).
This can be a real pain to figure out! My solution is to (quickly) visit the timers submenu and cancel the offending recording before the next exit (which takes 30 seconds to occur). I thought I should mention this in case somebody else gets stuck, or in case somebody has a proper fix.
The relevant code is on line 118 or recorder.c in vdr version 1.3.34. I have tried to patch it by replacing the call to cThread::EmergencyExit(true); with: Cancel(3); break; but the error is erratic enough that I can't be sure this is a fix.