Here’s the fastest way I’ve found to get good looking H.264 out of EyeTV, starting from your recorded program file.

1) save it as mpeg stream. This takes about 1 minute per hour of video. 2)load it into VisualHub. (Yes, I know it’s been abandoned. Deal with it.) 3) set optimize for (your device) under iTunes and standard quality, and check the H.264 box. (VH uses all your cores in the CPU, so it’s fastest)

You could be done, but if you think the output is too dark, do this:

4) load resulting movie from step 3 into QuickTime Pro. (Pro. Yeah: I know. Deal with this, too.) 5) Choose window/show controls and adjust the brightness to your liking 6) Choose File/save as (self-contained).

This process takes about 1/4 to 1/3 as much time as any other way I’ve found… at least on my setup.

Bonus section:

if you record HD on EyeTV, you’ll get a “squished” 640×480 image. Go ahead and do that, and export and manipulate as above… …however…

before you start compression in VisualHub, change the image size to 640×360. Voila! 🙂