some questions on EyeTV

I love my TiVo, but am having conflicts with the wife; too many shows to record for 2 tuners. So I'm considering offloading my recording of network shows (i.e. no CableCARD needed) by using a different method, e.g. EyeTV with my iMac. This raises a bunch of newbie questions. Perhaps someone can help:

1) Does anyone have any personal experience with the EyeTV HD (rather than any older/different Elgato hardware which has been discussed in this forum)? Any gotchas or reliability problems with this new hardware?

2) I assume the EyeTV software will also work with an HDHomeRun; lots of mentions of that here previously. Has anyone used the software to simultaneously control both an EyeTV HD and an HDHomeRun?

3) If I run the EyeTV software on a 2.4 GHz 24" iMac, 4 GB memory, that I use as my primary desktop, will I notice it running? In other words, how resource intensive is the software? BTW, I normally browse with flash disabled, so my CPUs generally have lots of headroom.

4) Can a program being recorded be played back before it has finished recording?

5) How well do EyeTV "trick" functions, such as FF, REW, etc work compared to TiVo?

Thanks for any help.

Thanks for the answers.

I think that for now I'll start with EyeTV software and the HDHR. Some other hardware may come later; e.g. if I buy an EyeTV HD and hook it up to my existing TiVo I can archive previously recorded content.

Eventually I may need to make a decision between the EyeTV HD and a Hauppauge HD PVR. Any opinions on which hardware is better, assuming I use the same EyeTV software to control them?

I'm glad to read that skip values are programmable. I think TiVo's values (30 seconds forward, 8 back) are usually too short.

TiVo never officially had 30 second skip. They added a backdoor code to enable it. Previously, you needed to re-enter this code every time the box rebooted (e.g. power failure or software update). But now the function persists.

The other nice thing about TiVo FF/REW is they can "skip to tick". What that means is they jump forward (or backward) either 15 or 30 minutes per button push (depending on length of program). This makes it very easy to e.g. advance 1 hr into a program:

• start playback of program

• press FF button

• press "skip to tick" 4 times

• press PLAY button

Presto, you're now viewing 1 hr into the program.

It's even simpler than it reads, because after a while your "muscle memory" knows what buttons to press. That's a lot faster than doing 32x FF and waiting close to 2 minutes to advance 1 hr. Which is what some other boxes want you to do.