Ok, followup on EyeTV, I can't recommend it anymore. Because:

1. The guide data has gone from working sometimes to not at all. It is downloading it, but not actually using it. I've purged the cache and it still won't display anything. This means record by name is broken, so only record by time works now.

2. Stability. The program has now crashed twice to the point of becoming a zombie program and forcing a reboot. kill -9 even failed on it. One crash resulted in a show not recording. I thought maybe a memory leak or something was causing it to occur, so I started having the Mac close it and re open it nightly, same issue. It also seems to crash if the live TV view is left on overnight.

3. No easy way to watch something being recorded. I came home tonight and watched a video netcast before watching Heroes, so that I could skip commercials. Went to start from the beginning, and the recording would instead dump me to live. Manually rewound all the way, and then 2 minutes in the playback would pause every 10 seconds for a second. Might be a sign that I need a gig of memory for the Mini though.

I was hoping this solution would allow me to just have a stable PVR platform, but for now, EyeTV is not ready for such duties. The nice thing is that the USB tuner I have works under Windows as well, so I might give Windows Media Center under Vista a try, and also the ReplayTV software. From my experience with Vista though on my old Inspiron 9100, I don't think that route will work for me either. The system can't even stay asleep on it's own.

If Tivo wasn't so interested in becoming evil, I'd almost be tempted by their over the air or cable card HD recorder.