[mythtvnz] Introduction

[Toby Mills]

I'd recommend going for the biggest hard drive you can lay your hands on.
I bought a 400Gb disk last year after starting with a 200Gb and its 
still about 1/3 of what I think I realistically need to avoid having 
older unwatched material expire before we have watched it (especially 
movies).
Also keep in mind that HD is just around the corner and 500Gb does not 
go very far in an HD world. Most of the people on this list will have to 
upgrade their hard disks once they go to HD. Realistically 1Tb is 
probably the minimum for HD.
+1 on going with a PVR150 not a 350, no point at all with what you are 
planning.
Also, if I was starting right now, I'd seriously consider not bothering 
with a PVR card at all.
I  run a PVR150 plugged into sky and two skystar2 cards which pull the 
freeview channels.
95% of what we watch comes off freeview and therefore doesn't use sky at 
all. I really only have sky for prime and discovery.
Not only that, the quality off a Skystar is an order of magnitude better 
than through the sky decoder.
I'd cancel sky but for laziness of then having to download stuff that I 
like to watch on discovery.

Make sure you buy a case that deals with noise well.
I've got a backend in the garage and our main front end is a shuttle 
which is generally regarded as being a fairly quiet box.
Its got no hard disk in it and the only noise is the main fan which I 
have throttled down to an absolute crawl, even with this, my partner 
still complains it is too noisy and we have 'pillows' etc stuffed into 
the TV cabinet to kill the noise. Its amazing how distracting a small 
amount of noise can be. A hard disk thrashing would be unbearable if it 
is audible.

Setting up a PVR150 with sky can be problematic and is not exactly 
trivial. There is still an air of black magic involved with getting the 
IRBlaster to work.
If you wanted a high WAF factor, then the skystar is a safer bet as its 
easier to setup and there are less things to go wrong.
If I was doing it again, I'd start with that and then progressively add 
sky with a PVR once I'd learnt a whole lot more about it.
Don't forget this thing is going to completely change your viewing 
habits, you will end up watching a lot more programs because you watch 
it on your terms rather than the networks and cuttnig out the ads means 
you fit more programs into the same time.
The first three months with it were somewhat traumatic because I bit off 
more than I could chew and tried to get everything all going right from 
scratch.

If you are thinking of getting the 350 to pickup UHF, then seriously 
don't bother and buy yourself a sat disk and a Skystar card, it might 
cost fractionally more but it will be easier and more of a long term 
solution and you will get extra WAF brownie points with the better 
picture. DVB muxing is also around the corner, so if you just buy one 
Skystar, its only a matter of time before myth will be able to split 
multiple channels off the one card, extra brownie points for being able 
to watch one channel while recording another.

Cheers
Toby