Before I dig deeper into this I would like to ask the community what has been tried
Have you tried "vdr-ui", it is a cgi-binary ran on PCH to fetch EPG from VDR and using streamdev to stream.
http://www.popcornforum.de/showthread.php?tid=5201&pid=71288
and what routes do you see as most viable?
Well this sounds the best option for full VDR front-end if recordings work as well..