vdr defaults to auto-shutdown; Setup - Miscellaneous - Min. user inactivity (min): should be 0

[TEN]

Buried deep in the menu is a preset option to unexpectedly terminate the VDR after 5 hours (and even the entire system it is running on if ENABLE_SHUTDOWN=1 in /etc/default/vdr).
This current default of vdr 1.7.22-1 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS should be changed to 0 minutes, i.e. disabled (or explicitly prompted to the user upon installation, possibly along with setting ENABLED=1 in the above file which is required for the VDR to auto-start at all but may be hard to find).

[TEN (launchpad-20-ten)]

Even in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, /etc/default/vdr is still missing ENABLED=1, so cannot auto-start the service (cf. user review of the package).

/var/lib/vdr/setup.conf still has a MinUserInactivity = 300 rather than 0, i.e. will inappropriately shut down the service after a while.

Users have little chance to find out that these changes are required, nor are they informed about needing w_scan (in package w-scan) to populate /var/lib/vdr/channels.conf - let alone femon (missing from the default repositories) to get signal parameters.

[TEN (launchpad-20-ten)]

Moreover, the Trusty Tahr's Software Center froze on both the first install and remove attempts for this package, but did install it when retrying.