First of all, there are good installation HOWTOs for Linux out there, which describe the set up of a HDTV capable VDR.
I used this installation HOWTO and a satellite dish with the appropriate feeds. (look for HDTV channels here).
I’ve played with VDR more than a half a year ago, and all was fine, but I’ve been on 32-bit environment (Ubuntu 7.10). Now I’ve tried to realize the same with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) few days ago and basically failed, because no matter what I’ve tried, only one core of my four CPU cores have been used by xine. Ergo the the rate of the dropped frames was quite high. My CPU btw is: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
At last using CoreAVC (See Tag Cloud on the right for CoreAVC infos) finally solved my problem. All four CPU cores were utilized almost equally for the H264 playback by the dshowserver.

After compiling the drivers you’ll need a little script which loads the driver and unloads them again.
I’ve create for such purposes these two scripts:

/usr/local/bin/dvb-load

modprobe dvb_core cam_debug=255
modprobe stb6100
modprobe stb0899
modprobe lnbp21
modprobe budget-ci
modprobe budget_core
modprobe saa7146

And for unloading the modules:
/usr/local/bin/dvb-unload

modprobe -r budget-ci
modprobe -r lnbp21
modprobe -r stb0899
modprobe -r stb6100
modprobe -r dvb_core


You’ll also need to add the channels listed almost at the end of this page into your /etc/vdr/channels.conf.

Now you need the dshowserver-standalone plugin for xine: dshowserver-standalone_2008-08-04-phi.tar.bz2.
I’ve got it from here: http://phivdr.dyndns.org/vdr/xine-lib/dshowserver/dshowserver-standalone_2008-08-04-phi.tar.bz2