AFAIK LinVDR starts in 25 seconds, shuts down in 10. Still not that fast, but I could live with that.
I use Debian rather than the LinVDR distribution. I'm not sure what the current version of LinVDR supports but when I last looked at it it didn't support my hardware very well.
The so called killer application. It has only one problem: its proprietary. There will always be people who will work on an open solution.
What makes it proprietary? XBMC is GPL'd and available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc/
If you are referring to the XBox hardware than that is no more proprietary than any of the DVB cards supported by Linux/VDR.
If on the other hand you are referring to the development environment then you are abolsultely correct. However progress is being made to rectify this with OpenXDK (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxdk/).
To sum it up: you got yourself a proprietary solution and now you are frustrated that VDR does not support it?
It's not as proprietary as you make it out to be and it's quite the opposite. I'm frustrated that it doesn't support VDR. I don't mention this on the XBMC forums because it is VDR users who stand to benefit the most and not XBMC users (at least that's my belief).
I do not know if any VDR to XBMC exists. You probably already asked Google for it I assume. Somewhere rings a bell, but probably because this XBMC question was asked before.
There's basically nothing but some attempts made in the past. as soon as I have the necessary software I may see if anything can be done about that. it seems to me that It should at least be possible to create a fully functional interface using python scripting and SVDRP. Live and recording replay is another story altogether.
Besides that I wonder if the XBox is really that much cheaper than an epia board with small harddisk plus dvd rom.
Wonder no more. You can get 2 XBox's for the price of an epia board with NO hard disj or DVD-Rom. You can get 2 Xbox's for the price of a single full featured DVB card. In fact you can get an XBox at about the same price as a decent Linux supported Budget DVB-T card. For the money I've spent trying to get a PC to do the job reasonably I could have had about 10 XBox's AND a VDR server with 4 budget DVB-T cards in it.
Regards, Michal