I don't know if this has ever been asked, or if there is a website about answering this but: what would be an ideal (tested) setup for a DVB-C VDR machine hardware-wise, and Distro/software-wise, in 2 situations:

1. Price is no object

Adding money would not enhance any quality if you are using full-featured DVB card as output. Money adds just more storage capacity, or more cards for multiple simultaneous transponders and IO performance to store them, and perhaps redundancy.

Of course when going to high definition television, you need fast CPU and graphics card, memory for X, plasma/lcd tv/projector with VGA/DVI inputs.

2. Budget option

Full-featured DVB card, and a looted computer system (you need IDE DMA IO for harddisk). Then add more storage.

I would not go for budget DVB card option because of potential problems it might bring to your system. But for budget card you need a softdevice-plugin for VDR, and that need CPU horsepower a bit more. P3/500 should be ok. Then some VGA card with TV-output and some tweaking.