[mythtv-users] Mythtv and Virtualbox?

[Simon Hobson]

Jim Abernathy <jfabernathy at outlook.com> wrote:

> Anyone have experience with this and could share some guidance??

I have a little running a Myth backend under Xen, not exactly what you were asking, but may give you some pointers ...

My hardware was (at the time) a (by todays standards) a low power AMD with about 2G of RAM and one tuner (HVR1250 (PCI) if I recall, UK Freeview (DVT-T)). It "worked" but suffered from the sort of problems you would expect where disk I/O (throughput and/or latency) is an issue - the whole system only had one disk ! Not surprisingly, while it worked fine, it wasn't hard to get it into situations where there'd be dropouts in the recordings.
TBH, given the constraints I put on it, it worked surprisingly well !

When I upgraded, it was to an HP Microserver - again AMD, not that highly powered. I tried running under Xen, but found that the tuners (HVR1350 (PCIe) IIRC) just didn't work properly with >4G RAM in the system. Worked fine with 8G and no Xen. I never got down to whether it was a Xen problem, System problem, capture card driver problem, or ....
HP still had a cashback offer on, so I bought another Microserver for Xen ! Figured the 50W it takes wasn't the end of the world - about £1/week in lecky for me.


Pluses:
Yes it works as a VM
If you can do PCI/USB passthrough then you can use those tuners - or you need network tuners

Minuses:
It's very easy to hit disk issues. But as long as your recording drive(s) are dedicated to Myth recordings you should be OK
You may hit issues with the tuners - local tuners will need USB or PCI passthrough to work and then it's possible that there may be problems. Network tuners should be OK.