[vdr] Developer versions

I don't find VDR 1.6.0 very reliable and I'm wondering whether 1.7 is mature enough now to be worth setting up. At the moment I use Debian packages and although I have to recompile it to add the Freesat patch it's still a lot easier than gathering the bits and pieces and getting it to live nicely on my system. Any chance of a 1.8 release soon?

I'd also be interested in the developer version of xine with VDPAU support. The trouble is there's a bewildering set of mercurial branches. There are some libxine2 packages in Debian experimental, but there don't seem to be any packages for "version 2" players, nor libxine2-dev packages (not to mention vdpau support) so I don't see what use they are.