I've been running MythTV for some time on my "big" machine, and have been battling with a lirc issue regarding AT&T U-Verse. It seems like lirc isn't cooperating during the times I'm actually using my PC. So, I was thinking about setting up a dedicated MythTV backend server - perhaps some small PC or Atom or whatever that I can plug my 3TB drive in and set it out of the way.

So, any thoughts on an inexpensive and physically small machine with a serial port, one open PCI slot (for PVR-150) and room for my 3TB data-only (no OS) drive? I was thinking maybe of something a bit older and off of ebay, but something new might be interesting, as well.

Older machines should play .avi Xvid/Divx standard definition content, depending on age of the system. As soon as you start looking at h.264 or any HD content, you need a machine with a fair bit of CPU power to decode the video. Or a video card that supports hardware video decoding (VDPAU, XvBA).

Atoms will not having enough power to play HD without a video card that supports one of those features.

You'll have really fun time trying to find any modern computer with a ISA slot as well. They were getting hard to find back in the pentium 4 days....

I'm only interested in a backend server. My frontend machines are fairly new and have plenty of steam.

D'oh'! I meant PCI, not ISA. I've corrected my post.