[piedpipr]

Ok, so this isn't the perfect solution but here it is.
In short - I have launcher run Virtualbox with XP as a vm. Yes, I cheated.

1. Get your hands on Virtualbox (the free one). I know that in Mint and Ubuntu that it is available in the software manager.

2. Have a XP disk.

3. Get a new Virtual Machine into Virtualbox with XP on it. If you don't know how to do this, look at Virtualbox's very excellent documentation.

4. Load Firefox (cuz we all hate IE). Go to netflix, and get the firefox silverlight plugin.

5. Restart Firefox. Load netflix again.

6. Save your machine state in Virtualbox. This makes virtually no boot time! Virtualbox calls it a "snapshot"

7. In xbmc, get launcher if you don't already have that addon. Load it and put in /usr/lib/virtualbox/Virtualbox

8. Arguments are "--startvm (name of the vm) --fullscreen"

9. Profit


P.S. Any questions and I'll answer them as best as I can

[piedpipr]

I hope these screen captures help with anything.

[charlesshoults]

Is this possible if using an XBMC installation based on Ubuntu Server? Prior to installing XBMC, my installation took up half the space a typical Ubuntu installation took and I have a lot less overhead. I'm really not that interested in a conventional desktop environment, but I do have a couple Windows XP licenses lying around, so I'm interested.

[darkscout]

You don't need a conventional desktop environment. Almost everything will run bare on top of X11. It's near useless by itself because it's a single app. Which is why most people install Gnome, XFCE, XDE, et al.

Code:

apt-get install virtualbox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libvncserver0 python-central
Suggested packages:
  libvncserver0-dbg virtualbox-guest-additions-iso vde2
Recommended packages:
  virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-source virtualbox-qt libqt4-opengl libqtgui4
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libvncserver0 python-central virtualbox
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.0 MB of archives.
[b]After this operation, 46.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.[/b]

.

I would say you might want some extra RAM and this will be entirely CPU decoding. I only have a 1.8gHz and 1GB of ram, plenty for XBMC, doubt it'll do emulation.

[charlesshoults]

My system will hopefully be okay with it.

ECS H55H-I
Intel i3-550 3.2GHz dual-core with hyperthreading
4GB PC3-1333

I have VirtualBox installed, but I'm not sure how to get to it. I feel kind of dumb saying that. If I had a desktop, it would be blasted easy.

Code:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list
  wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc
  apt-key add oracle_vbox.asc
  apt-get update
  apt-get install virtualbox-3.2

For trial-and-error, I installed Launcher and what do you know, Launcher launches stuff...

I forget how much I hate XP until I try to use it. It's installed, with guest additions and running updates, but I have the strangest issue. As long as I'm just using the mouse, everything is well, but the instant I touch a key on the keyboard, I lose keyboard and mouse capture and I have to click off the screen and back onto it to regain it. Takes a Hell of a long time to type anything into fields.

[charlesshoults]

When XBMC is sitting idle, the screensaver kicks in and everything is good. But if Windows XP is sitting on the desktop or if I'm watching a movie in Netflix, after 10 minutes or so, the monitor goes to power save because the OS think's it's sitting idle. The movie continues to play. I press a key on the remote and the monitor wakes back up. XP is set to no screensaver and never to sleep, so it must be something in XBMC doing it.

How do I definitely stop idle sleep in XBMC?

[charlesshoults]

It seems that as far as Linux is concerned, when switched to Virtualbox, XBMC is inactive, the machine is at the equivalent of a terminal window and is sitting idle, as long as there is no keyboard or mouse input.

I've tried:
xset -dpms
setterm -blank 0

Hopefully one of those two commands should keep it from blanking out every 10 minutes.

It didn't solve the problem.

[xb4me]

This is excellent guys, I stumbled upon this solution as well, it is the only free one that works. PlayOn works, but you have to pay for it and the interface sucks. I have the same issue of black screen every 10 minutes or so requiring a keypress to fix. Lets work this out OK?

I have some contributions: install the guest drivers, and enable them in the virtual box settings. The 3d support allows me to play HD movies, but the OSD from silverlight does not work on my nvidia8200 chipset. With just 2d acceleration enabled I get 1080p full screen streaming netflix almost without glitch ( caveat read below ).

I have another problem. If I kill xbmc and start x, then run virtual box and stream netfix I can watch 1080p almost without any glitch, but if I do the same thing from within xbmc launcher I get more break up of the video and audio, unwatchable. It looks like the xbmc screensaver is running in the background or something, can I make launcher consume all the cpu somehow? I tried 'renice' and 'nice' but it did not seem to have any effect...

Please keep this thread alive, lets make this solution work!

[slonoma98]

Can this be done on a XBMC live install? Sorry I'm a complete noob to Linux.


Read a little more clearly and figured it out. Great work