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Hey guys, I was wondering if it is possible to have xbmc installed in a virtual machine and have that output thru hdmi to my tv while I surf or do whatever on my pc?
Or is that beyond the limitations of virtualization and the video card interface.
I'm running a 2500k and asus gtx460 so I'd have 2 dvi outputs going to desk monitors and the hdmi running to the tv.
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Probably not ~ on Windows anyway...
Last time i played with VMWare Player/WorkStation/Server it only virtualized a "basic" SVGA Graphic Card - which wouldn't be enough for XBMC.
VMWare Fusion on the Mac will emulate/passthru the real Graphic Card (GTX460) ~ so if you had a Mac, running Fusion - it would posisbly work.
Of course as i mentioned... this was the last time i played with VMWare ~ and things may have changed on it by now(?)
As to alternative Virtualized environments i.e: Windows Virtual PC, Xen or VirtualBox - i haven't touched any of these...
But basically, if the virtualized environment can 'see' (or passthru) and not emulate a Graphic Card - then it would quite possibly work.
I've always speculated about a Xeon based Server running VMWare ESXi ~ because with the 'right hardware' ESXi will passthru the graphic card to the Virtual Machine.
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I've run XBMC on a Win7 VM running inside Sun VirtualBox with success, thought this visualization solution does not allow direct output to a host PC hardware, like HDMI on the main PC videorard.
And the VirtualBox virtual videocard does not support video acceleration so everything is done via a virtual CPU, so video playback in the VM is quite choppy.
Bottom line: this is suitable for testing purposes but not for real, regular usage.
