I wouldn't bother upgrading, to be honest.
I've had several attempts to upgrade to 1.7 and VDPAU - but consistently get audio/video sync problems with live video and issues with indexing during rewinding/forwarding during playback. Have spent more hours than I care to say trying to fix this, only to downgrade again.
vdr-1.6.0 and xine-0.8.0 work just fine for me!!
To be fair to my comment above, I've had audio sync problems with live TV on all versions above vdr-xine-0.8.0 which is why I've never been able to run a newer version in production. I've had several posts on this and tried everything anyone has suggested - but after an hour or my wife banging on about the poor quality, always downgrade back to VDR-1.6.0 and VDR-XINE-0.8.0
So I don't think my problems are related to VDPAU or VDR-1.7.x.
-Simon