I'd like to see VLC support for Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U PVR-box. It is WIS GO7007SB chip based quite cheap external USB2 hardware encoder which can compress DivX, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 & MPEG-1. It's priced around 130 euros in Finland.
There is Linux SDK is available at http://www.plextor.com/english/support/LinuxSDK.htm . According SDK video stream is available through the Video4Linux2 API and the audio stream is available through the ALSA API.