I just installed Vista Ultimate as a virtual machine (Hyper-V) and all of the shows I try to record are only 50kB and won't play on my HTPC (or other MCE PCs). Do I need to continue troubleshooting or will this just not work?

Tuner is a HDHomeRun, fresh install of Ultimate, all updates completed, no additional software installed except for the HDHR tool. The little red record light stays in the taskbar for as long as that show is on but the file never gets any bigger than 50k...

I know the HDHR is working correctly as I can preview channels with VLC.
I've rescanned channels several times with both the HDHR and also within MC.

Normally at this point I would just assume that what I am trying isn't possible, but recording TV in a VM with Windows 7 beta works just fine. I'd prefer DVR-MS files if possible just because they seem to have more 3rd party support at this time.

Can anyone confirm that this will or will not work? Am I overlooking something silly?

Thanks,

Robin

Just an update:

This actually works fine. I guess my problem was I wasn't being patient enough? Or MCE was taking longer to finalize the file than I thought it would?

I would start recording a show and then stop the recording and then wait a second and the file would still be 50k and my drives would be the exact same size with that file size as well so I assumed there wasn't any buffer being built up anywhere. I just recorded the tail end of a show (which I let finish instead of just stopping the recording) and when I came back to check on it, it was 600MB and plays fine on my HTPC.

This is pretty exciting. Now I can turn my HTPC off unless I'm actually using it and save a little electricity. Plus, with DVR-MS files, I can use DVRMSToolbox to remove commercials and then output the commercial free file to my WHS (also a virtual machine) which is part of my library for my Windows 7 HTPC. Neato!

I don't really see many other people on here talking about virtualizing so let me take a second to explain my old setup and my new setup.

I used to have 3 computers running all the time. 

1: WHS to backup the other computers and host files and whatnot as well as running services like Simplify Media and SqueezeCenter. This machine is based on a 15W 2Ghz turion chip and pretty efficient.

2. My Desktop which was on all the time mainly so I could easilly respond to email and sit down and write whenever the urge struck me. It stayed on all the time because I'm lazy and would forget to turn it off. This was my old HTPC so was a 45W Athlon X2 2.3Ghz with a 690G chipset. Whatever people tell you, this system will NOT PLAY blu ray discs without studdering.

3. My HTPC which is a 45W Athlon X2 2.5Ghz with 780G chipset with graphics card running hybrid crossfire (much better with blu ray). It was on all the time to record shows.

So my new setup is my Desktop from above (now with 8GB of ram) with a RAID mirror for the primary drive. Host OS is Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role added. I decided to use the full install for convinience.

The VMs I have are:

1. WHS with a second drive dedicated to it for duplication. (1GB ram allocated)

2. Server 2008 set up as a workstation. This hosts simplifymedia and squeezecenter as well as utorrent.(1GB)

3. Vista Ultimate for recording TV. DVRMSToolbox is the only other software loaded on here (2GB)

4. Windows 7 OS for, um, low brow persuits on the interwebs and checking software compatibility without messing up the HTPC.(1GB)

5. Server 2008 as workstation for my personal desktop. Any 'actual' computing is done here. Office, CS4, Visual Studio is all here (2GB).

I can have all of these running at the same time on that dual core 2.3Ghz athlon and it is pretty much like working on a native machine (well, a native machine with 4MB of video memory...) I can't believe I didn't think of this ealier! I guess it helps memory is so darn cheap now. That 8GB was less than $100.

Anyway, hope this helps someone out. Being able to create a "backend" for my HTPC was the biggest bonus. It's like SageTV except prettier. :)

1. Did you attempt to attach any USB or PCI/PCI-X tuners in this PC for the Vista Media Center VM?  I doubt that it will work without some type of virtualization in Hyper-V, but thought I would check anyway....in case I missed such a detail.
2. I am also curious why you chose to run your "personal desktop" under Windows 208 Server rather than Vista?
3. How is the "second hard drive" attached to the WHS VM?

 

DanH_HP_m376n:

1. Did you attempt to attach any USB or PCI/PCI-X tuners in this PC for the Vista Media Center VM?  I doubt that it will work without some type of virtualization in Hyper-V, but thought I would check anyway....in case I missed such a detail.
2. I am also curious why you chose to run your "personal desktop" under Windows 208 Server rather than Vista?
3. How is the "second hard drive" attached to the WHS VM?

Can't answer #2 but Virtulization is what I do for a living so I can answer 1 and 3

1. Not currently supported.  The workstation VM products such as Virtual PC or VMware workstation will allow you to pass through a USB device so in that case it would work but the servers don't allow this.  You can get USB devices in a server by using a USB to IP bridge like the USB Anywhere devices.

3. You can add as many "hard drives" as you want to a guest, on the physcial machine they're just vhd files.

I just took the VMware Fast Track course last week, and I'm dying to try some stuff out.  I was thinking of setting up my machine kind of similarly, but using Ubuntu as the host OS and Sun VirtualBox as the virtualization software.

I assume that Aero is not an option in a VM, which is fine.

I have a PCIe tuner card but I guess I could sell it and get an HDHR. Last time I had one of those, it only got aboug 60% signal, whereas my PCIe tuner gets 100%...  It was used, though, so maybe it was on its way to PC heaven...

I was also thinking of virtualizing my laptop, in so much as accessing a VM of Windows 7 32-bit (it's an old Dell D600, but runs Win7 b7000 just fine - haven't tried any later builds on it yet) instead of relying on a local Windows XP copy.  I guess my biggest question there is, can you boot from ethernet over wireless?  I'm guessing that's a big fat no...

buymysoul, in your setup, do you have a seperate tuner for live TV in your HTPC? I was thinking of ending up with a similar setup to what you're describing, but I want to be able to watch live TV on the main TV. (of course, I could still use the Xbox 360 as an extender)

DanH_HP_m376n:

1. Did you attempt to attach any USB or PCI/PCI-X tuners in this PC for the Vista Media Center VM? I doubt that it will work without some type of virtualization in Hyper-V, but thought I would check anyway....in case I missed such a detail.


2. I am also curious why you chose to run your "personal desktop" under Windows 208 Server rather than Vista?


3. How is the "second hard drive" attached to the WHS VM?

Sorry for the delayed response. I didn't think I'd have to explicitly request email notification for a thread I started...

So 1. No I didn't try that but I know it doesn't work with Hyper-V. Actually, none of the Microsoft virtualization stuff can connect the VMs to usb or pci stuff (except hard drives). In my case it didn't matter because I use a HDHR (but in this digital age I don't see why anyone would buy anything less) and it connected fine. Actually, the VMs don't see a single piece of real hardware (except 3).
One thing that would be interesting to try is if you remote desktop into a computer, you can allow it to connect to "supported plug and play devices" I wonder if tuners are on that list? I've been interested in how well the Hauppage usb tuner works, maybe I'll pick one up and check it out.
2. Mainly just for fun and to try it out.
Server 2008 and Vista are (from what I can glean off the interweb) for most purposes the same. The main difference is when you start Vista everything is turned on and when you start with 2008 everything is turned off and you have to explicitly turn stuff on that you want to use. There is a little utility on a website dedicated to using server 2k8 as a desktop (some people have pretty dull hobbies, no?) and so it was just a matter of pressing a few buttons to get Server 2008 to look and act as I wanted. I just wanted a non-beta OS to run everyday stuff on and I figured it seemed like a good solution.
3. Within the main Server 2008 host OS, if you go to manage drives and make a drive "offline" then you can assign it exclusively to a virtual machine. If you unplug it from the computer and plug it into another computer, it looks like a normal drive (I confirmed this). I figured this was pretty darn important since I depend on WHS to keep my computers backed up and my archived files safe. (yes I have disc copies of the really important stuff but you know what I mean)

treacherous:

I just took the VMware Fast Track course last week, and I'm dying to try some stuff out.  I was thinking of setting up my machine kind of similarly, but using Ubuntu as the host OS and Sun VirtualBox as the virtualization software.

I assume that Aero is not an option in a VM, which is fine.

I have a PCIe tuner card but I guess I could sell it and get an HDHR. Last time I had one of those, it only got aboug 60% signal, whereas my PCIe tuner gets 100%...  It was used, though, so maybe it was on its way to PC heaven...

I was also thinking of virtualizing my laptop, in so much as accessing a VM of Windows 7 32-bit (it's an old Dell D600, but runs Win7 b7000 just fine - haven't tried any later builds on it yet) instead of relying on a local Windows XP copy.  I guess my biggest question there is, can you boot from ethernet over wireless?  I'm guessing that's a big fat no...

buymysoul, in your setup, do you have a seperate tuner for live TV in your HTPC? I was thinking of ending up with a similar setup to what you're describing, but I want to be able to watch live TV on the main TV. (of course, I could still use the Xbox 360 as an extender)

I don't know much at all about other solutions, but have you looked at VMWare's ESXi? If I wasn't so lazy, I would have just used a straight 'bare metal' install with Hyper-V. I tried to load ESXi but it didn't seem to want to play nice with my hardware (could have been me though). I don't think it will allow for VMs to see stuff like PCI tuners either though.
Virtualbox looks interesting, I'll have to read up on it.

Hyper-V only gives a whopping 4MB worth of video ram to the OS, so, uh, no, no Aero. :)
I'm just using Clear QAM and haven't tried any other tuners in this town so I'm not the guy to ask about signal strength but I've been really happy with the HDHR. Those guys seem to crank out new firmware like once a month and are constantly improving the software (go take a peek at the change log). Plus it's basically just the one device that they have been working on for what, 3 or 4 years now...Gotta be improving, right?
The way Windows 7 and the HDHR work together is so much nicer than with Vista (channel mapping for unrecoginized channels is so much less of a hassle) too.
Boot from ethernet over wireless: If your machine running the Host OS is cabeled to your router and has WOL (wake on lan) capabilities, I don't see why not. I imagine there is software out there made to specifically wake up computers with WOL but it has been a long time since I've messed with that stuff.

I actually do not have a seperate tuner right now but am planning on getting one soon (to get around those rare occasions when 3 good things are on TV at the same time). I wanted to do a little proof of concept first before spending the money. The HDHR does work with multiple computers though so as long as I'm only recording 1 show on the Virtual Vista Machine, the HTPC can use the second tuner in the HDHR.

I hate to resurrect an old thread, but I haven't had much luck with the search feature.

I am in the stages of putting a VMC box back together for HD QAM channels via a HDHomerun.  I have a small Atom based box that seems to do the job well enough and I use my 360 extender as a display.

I am contemplating picking up the new Acer Easystore WHS box (4 hot swap, small case) and installing VMC inside of a VM.  It appears that you can virtualize VMC, and with the HDHomerun I don't have to worry about hardware devices.

I need to know whether or not you can connect an extender into the VM and whether or not a little Atom 230 (1.6GHz) w/ 2GB RAM is powerful enough to handle simple duties.  Thoughts? Comments?

Apprecitate it! 

- Jason

 

 It MIGHT work if all your doing is recording and watching through an extender, without hardware acceleration you can forget about watching on the VM.  You might have more luck with WIN7, much less resource intensive.

 

Yes it works but as mentioned go with W7, much more stable and less resource intensive. My 3 extenders are connected to a virtualized HTPC running W7 x64.

This is good news! Yes, the actual virtualized VMC will be nothing but a back end recorder. 100% of my display/acceleration would come via an extender. Hopefully the Atom 230 (1.6GHz) will be enough horsepower to record the HD shows. You can connect to your virtualized box and extenders; what sort of CPU usage do you see? I hope this will work for me as I could kill 2 birds with 1 stone. That Acer Easystore WHS box is one hell of a value. Thanks! - Jason

jkmonroe01

I hate to resurrect an old thread, but I haven't had much luck with the search feature.

I am in the stages of putting a VMC box back together for HD QAM channels via a HDHomerun.  I have a small Atom based box that seems to do the job well enough and I use my 360 extender as a display.

I am contemplating picking up the new Acer Easystore WHS box (4 hot swap, small case) and installing VMC inside of a VM.  It appears that you can virtualize VMC, and with the HDHomerun I don't have to worry about hardware devices.

I need to know whether or not you can connect an extender into the VM and whether or not a little Atom 230 (1.6GHz) w/ 2GB RAM is powerful enough to handle simple duties.  Thoughts? Comments?

Apprecitate it! 

- Jason

 

Just wondering if you've tried this out, yet. I recently bought an HP EX485 and am thinking of moving the Media Center recording duties onto it. I currently have a dedicated HTPC that does the recording, but I'd prefer to use that for viewing only if possible (that way I don't have to worry about lack of storage). So I'm thinking of virtualizing Windows 7 on my EX485 to take over that task. Would love to hear about your experiences and whether or not they were successful.

JTravers

Just wondering if you've tried this out, yet. I recently bought an HP EX485 and am thinking of moving the Media Center recording duties onto it. I currently have a dedicated HTPC that does the recording, but I'd prefer to use that for viewing only if possible (that way I don't have to worry about lack of storage). So I'm thinking of virtualizing Windows 7 on my EX485 to take over that task. Would love to hear about your experiences and whether or not they were successful.

An update on my experiences with this. I was able to virtualize Windows 7 on my EX485 (using VMware Server 2.0) and setup recording to a hard drive not in the storage pool. I had to do this through a network share, though, because I wanted the recordings to be immediately available for viewing and not stuck inside a virtual disk. (I used 7MC instead of VMC because I figured it would less of a memory hog.)

Had to disable "Large Send Offload" on the host's NIC; otherwise, file copying speeds were horribly slow. The only problem this causes is a large CPU overhead when recording. Recording 2 shows at the same time uses about 70% of the EX485's CPU, with random spikes reaching up to 100%. This causes occasional dropouts in the recordings. I was thinking of upgrading my CPU to a dual-core to help lower the high CPU usage.

Other than the occasional dropouts caused by high CPU usage, this setup is working flawlessly. I just wish I could figure out a safe way to put my EX485 into standby without causing problems with the VM and/or missing recordings. As of now, I have resigned myself to having the WHS on 24/7.

If anyone has any suggestions for curing the high CPU usage or figuring out the standby issues, I would greatly appreciate hearing them.

Thanks!

If my reseacrh is accurate, that device was meant as a Windows home server and has a puny Celeron processor.  You definitely want to go dual core with your media hub.  Celeron is not going to cut it.