With a monitor I think softdevice will give you the best picture. What
are you missing in terms of functionality that want you to try a hw+
card?
Both softdevice and vdr-xine have disadvantages. Speed of OSD (scaling), speed
of play, bugs (vdr crashing in edit mode, etc).
I use vdr-xine 0.5.1-pre (BTW Is Reinhard still alive?), but I wanted to
try "hw mode" to avoid its disadvantages.
I'm still alive and working on release 0.5.1 e. g. fixing and speeding up
scaled OSD. Currently, I'm porting back xine patches to get them included into
RC6.