OT; Speed of virtual computer

[Bill]

A chum has recorded lots of material via his dvr onto an external drive. As the dvr is Linux based, he, or it, formatted the drive with a Linux file system, probably EXT4.

He now wants to watch the material via his Windows 10 PC and asked me how.

I thought it might be worth looking at whether he could run Linux Mint as a virtual machine using VMware ( the free version), and so set this up on a laptop here.

I had to dig out a docking station for the laptop as it has no CD drive and VMware didn't recognise my usb optical drive, but then all went well and I can play videos from a usb HD through Mint. However, they are not smooth and play with a sort of jerky motion.

Increasing the virtual memory and number of virtual processor cores makes no difference.

I tried installing VMware tools, but ran into permission problems with Mint.

The question is, should I dive into trying to install these tools in the hope they might help, or is there something else I've missed?

[Andy Burns]

VirtualBox has pretty good graphics pass-through, might be worth a go instead of VMware.

[RJH]

I had to recover some files from a failing NAS drive recently. I plugged the drive into a W10 machine (directly, using SATA, a USB caddy didn't work) and used a combination of Diskinternals Linux Reader and Ext2 Volume Manager. One of them mounted the drive and made the files visible, the other displayed the file structure in an easy to read way (how it looked on the NAS).

I can't quite remember what I did - there was a bit of stabbing about ISTR. Ask here, or probably better on uk.comp.homebuilt if you/your mate gets stuck.

[tabbypurr]

You might want to look up the performance of differing file systems. They vary greatly.

There's also the clunkier option to copy the file to internal drive before viewing.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yep. There is. The video layer on a VM is 'emulated' Quite simply you will NEVER get a full speed screen in a VM.

Virtualbox might be better than VMware. That is free too.

A FAR better approach is to either use another machine with SAMBA and 'mount' the ext4 drives under windows, or somehow make the VM accessible to the host machine as a network share. Then the screen drivers will be pure fullspeed native windows

Or make the machine Linux and watch them that way and relegate Windows to the VM.

But best of all. Add ext4 drivers to windows

>

[Theo]

To a first approximation (unless you pass through a whole GPU). However, VMware does have reasonable GPU emulation. But you do need VMWare Tools to install the drivers for their emulated GPU hardware, so it'll be very slow unless you do that.

Virtualbox's GPU emulation is worse than VMWare's, IME. It haven't compared them recently, but last time I did Virtualbox would hard crash on the 3D app I needed to run.

Theo

[Bill]

Thanks to everyone for the help. Here's where I have reached:

I appreciate that adding Linux drivers to Windows would be the best option, although there seemed to be snags with both the suggested implementations, namely some money or some bugs. If I can get a VM to install and work well, I still think that could be the best option for this particular person.

I've installed VirtualBox with its extensions, and it plays my test videos reasonably well, probably good enough for him. But within Mint on VirtualBox, for some reason I can't get to the Settings->Display screen. Every other menu item seems to work OK, but that one just flashes the window on the screen and then vanishes. Presumably this could be sorted out via a command line, but I want to avoid that for this user.

With VMWare, I'm still failing to install the Tools in spite of following their instructions. I load the virtual CD inside Mint and then attempt to run the .sh script. The other day it seemed to start, but then said permission denied when getting to the actual installation. Today it seems to do nothing. Again, as above re the command line and the user.

I'll keep trying, but thanks again to all for the suggestions.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Is there enough disk space on Windows to just copy them all to the Windows disk?

At least you could do this with one of them and see if it plays better from Windows directly.

[alan_m]

[Andrew]

If they are broadcast HD programs then there could well be copyright protection. Programs recorded by my Humax HD FOX T2 can only be played back through the machine that made the recordings.

[Bob Eager]

Then you need to install the custom firmware, which allows generation of DRM-free files.

[Steve Walker]

Plug it into a Raspberry Pi and set up a Samba share?

SteveW

[Bill]

I have no idea what model his Humax is, but it is different from mine

I don't know what he has recorded or in what format.

I have copied and edited video from my Humax here via a memory stick, but can't remember how. I think I jumped through a lot of hoops installing software, but then discovered most of it was unnecessary.

He is on his own with DRM - getting some data off is where I will stop.

Today's plan is to try loading Mint via VirtualBox. This has the advantage of giving him Linux to look at and perhaps occasionally use.

If that fails, I think I will get him to run Mint from a live DVD, and plug in his external drive to copy between that and the main machine (or a second usb drive). I've tested that here and it seems to work.

Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well that's down to the recoreder. I can record HD off air and play it back FINE using a 30 quid sat card in my server.