Hello!
I would like to share some of thoughts on what I have observed over a short periode of time. I've been following the mailing list, I don't have practically any knowledge in programming so I won't even try to comment on the technical details of the vdr project itself. I would also like to point out that this is not an invitation to a discussion from my part as I wont be able to participate due to time constraint in my private life. I am also a huge fan of the vdr project and I'm in the process of building a htpc running vdr myself :) This is how I feel I am able to contribute to the project without having actual coding knowledge. Hopefully no one is offended by anything I say, as I'm not trying to point out any incompetence in anyone.
Enough jibberish, I'll get to the point at hand, now.
In my opinion the vdr project is sliding into a bad direction, not code wise. I don't know if an actual roadmap exists somewhere about the planned features for the 1.5-devel series but there should be one. The devel series looks like it's getting flooded with new features, which is great ofcourse and shows that people are contributing to the project. But this is where I see a risk and it looks something like this: The stable version of vdr (1.4.6.something at the time being afaik) get's "older" all the time and only the most vital parts from the devel-branch get backported. Now that is not a problem on it's own, stability is good, but if the 1.5 devel branch gets new features constantly with no feature freeze in site...hopefully people understand where I'm going with this.
I'll once again remind everyone reading this that I don't have all the facts concerning this project at hand and there might very well be a roadmap which is strictly followed, and if this is the case all is good and you can ignore this message =)
Last but not least, Huge Props to all the people working on this project, contributing in whatever way they can and thanks for creating something I can put on a computer, hand the remote to the mrs and tell her to record whatever she wants and not have to worry about it breaking down. This was my attempt to contribute to this project.