Virtualization questions

gtg60

Ok, looking for some opinions here, trying to decide if my project is better off going in a different direction.

My plan was always to use Win 7's Media Centre on each of my TV's to have a comprehensive media experience but with energy costs the way they are I thinking would I be better off with one powerful machine virtualizing the 3 Win 7 OS's with 3 graphic's cards running in that machine to each of the TV's.

Is this possible? What kind of hardware would I require? Software required etc?

Thanks

longshotvalue

Definatly dont virtualise anything to to with video, youd need a very powerful machine and its wouldnt be anywhere near as good as 3 seperate machines..

You can build 3 small Media pcs for very little really..

SouperComputer

Virtualization is not going to work in your scenario and does not operate in the manner you suggest. A specific VM cannot have control over a specific graphics card and in any event the display capabilities are limited.
Is there a certain functionality that's pushing you towards full blown PCs as clients instead of Xbox 360s or other extenders? With a PC

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>Extender(s) setup you could virtualize the Windows 7 PC thats serving the media, although there is little point to be honest. With the single PC + extender(s) setup it's going to be a lot easier to consolidate and control your media.

gtg60

SouperComputer wrote: »

Is there a certain functionality that's pushing you towards full blown PCs as clients instead of Xbox 360s or other extenders? With a PC

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>Extender(s) setup you could virtualize the Windows 7 PC thats serving the media, although there is little point to be honest. With the single PC + extender(s) setup it's going to be a lot easier to consolidate and control your media.

Thanks to both of you, looks like that idea is out the window.

Soupercomputer I have used an XBox 360 in the past and I seem to remember some issues with Media types, I also think I can build a more efficient low power PC than an XBox but I won't rule it out altogether.

Is it possible to run 2 instances of Media Centre off the one machine? That could solve a few problems as the TV in the kids room isn't even HD so would need less processing power plus it's unlikely both machines (TV's) would need to be run at the same time (but there would be some overlap).

gtg60

Hmmm, the new Corona based 360's have a power supply with a rated maximum of 115Watts, maybe this is worth looking into...

SouperComputer

They play prettymuch anything now, even raw flvs pulled from youtube or what not. Not sure about mkv's though if thats your thing.
Sure, you can put a PC at every telly, but its another set of libraries to manage, an operating system to maintain and update, keep clean and lets face it, if you have kids its going to be harder for them to toast the software on the xbox than it would a full-blown windows PC. Dont get me wrong, the full PC has its merits, but the Xbox has come a long way over the last few years. Part of the problem is with a PC is the temptation to tweak and tweak, add functionality and soforth and you end up just spending time tweaking instead of enjoying media with the family.

You cant have two instances of media center running on a single PC. I'd reccomend that you build a single PC for all the media and work from it. Use an SSD for the OS as it will speed up the general peformance of the extenders quite a bit, including launching media center. When you launch MC on an extender it log into windows on the PC and starts a psuedo RDP session so the SSD can help noticably with that. Other improvement wil be seen when you are searching a library or whatnot, or when you want to "play all" the video in a given folder. If you like, you can modify the file permissions on the Windows 7 box so that the extenders cannot delete certain (or any) content. CPU doesnt need to be all that spiffy, the xbox will do the heavy lifting for decoding a core2 in the Windows 7 PC would be just fine. Ideally you will want a 1Gb NIC on the PC hosting the media and the clients confgured at 100Mb/s.

I have one of the newer xboxs and they are very close to being silent. Of course its different when you slap a disk in there!

vibe666

Soupercomputer is 100%right. one of the areas virtualisation technology is lacking in is video performance and at this stage in the game you can't assign a graphics card to individual VM's anyway, even if performance could be improved, so it's going to be a non-runner.

if you are determined to run MCE boxes, you could always get low profile nettops like the Acer Revo's (the R3700, or wait for the new generation to come out soon as Voodu Child mentioned in another HTPC thread recently in one of the other sub-forums here) or similar.

another option on the same hardware would be a nettop running XBMC (specifically the OpenELEC variant of it to get the best performance), or a jailbroken AppleTV2 running XBMC although each one will have it's pro's and con's.

gtg60

Thanks guys, plenty of reasons to stick with the project as planned (but use one or two extenders). Never even considered how an SSD would speed up the extenders experience too!

rolion

Might be offtopic but that's the way i thought it som elong time ago:

-get a TV in each kid's room
-get net cable /wireless from each room to main comm point
-get a cheapie Db sat receiver (800HD)
-get FTA on Astra (good selection for kids there...)
-get a NAS box,4Gb and save all shared content (movies,music,photo),create user accounts and permissions
-access the shared media from db remote control and GUI,over lan
-watch TV and have access to local media

i stopped doing it mainly due to issue of not wanting TVs in kids room but rather share a TV/Projector in the main room so we can watch TV whenever we want and movietime at weekend !

gtg60

I have most of those things at the moment, I want to have a common interface in each room that will allow access to all my media and TV, the TV end of it is sorted as I use products from DVBLogic.
I want a common interface to use in each room, this will ensure that once I have taught everybody in the house to use it that they will be able to use every TV in every room.

The virtualization end of it was to save on power and resources but it's looking like my original plan will be followed (more or less) but I may have an extender in the kids room to save on costs/ power.