HTPCNews.com has a nice review of the Plextor ConvertX product with SageTV. HTPCNews has some good screen comparisions between MPEG4 encoding, MPEG2 encoding, and the Hauppauge 250 encoding. Here’s their final pro/con list:

Pros

• Hardware DivX encoding!!
• USB 2.0 so it doesn’t use a precious PCI slot.
• Works with SageTV and soon BeyondTV (from what we’ve heard).

Cons

• Software bundle that is really not useful for HTPCs.
• Needs some tweaking to get the input to the quality level of a PVR-250.
• Where’s MCE support (even if only in MPEG2 mode)?

I’m really impressed with the Plextor guys. I took notice when they came out with the original killer hardware specs including MPEG4 encoding and USB2 interface, but they’ve taken it one step farther by doing a couple great partnerships with SageTV on Windows and EyeTV on Macintosh. It’s a combination that is hard to beat.

Additional Info:

TVHarmony Product Tracker: Plextor