Importing video into EyeTV

I use an Elgato EyeTV for my media center and it works quite well. My 3.5 year old son knows how to use it to watch his shows, so when my mom burned a DVD for him, I had to figure out how to get the video into the EyeTV to make it as easy as possible for him to watch it. As quality wasn’t really my concern, I looked for any and every available option for how to import it even if it required transcoding.

After reading a post on the EyeTV forum, I started to look for a way to convert an H.264 encoded file into an MPEG Transport Stream. I generated the H.264 encoded file using Handbrake. After a bunch of futzing (hours), I found an option in VLC that transcodes the video into an MPEG TS. I did not check the Transcode video and Transcode audio check boxes, selected MPEG TS and it quickly spit out a file that the EyeTV could read. The forum post said to hold down the command key while selecting Open QuickTime movie, and then basically treat the stream as an input and record. While it records in real time, I patiently waited and the video encoded. (Yes, the quality went down a little bit, but my son doesn’t care.)

While this process worked perfectly for what I wanted, it seems far too complex to just import video. I can understand that El Gato is a small company and doesn’t want to make EyeTV into a generalized media center; however, it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to handle other media types.