[TriLUG] Netflix streaming through guest OS?

John Brier johnbrier at gmail.com
Wed Oct 7 22:44:07 EDT 2009


> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 10:21:04 -0400
> From: Carl Crider <c.crider at gmail.com>
> Subject: [TriLUG] Netflix streaming through guest OS?
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <a15937530910070721l770626bcv9386e02577b7e1b7 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>  Since VirtualBox has been a recent topic, I'm interested if anyone is
> using Netflix streaming through a
> guest (non-Linux) OS? Since the streaming doesn't work with my current
> media box, I'm wondering
> if this is a solution.[?]
>
>  If you are doing this, can you please share your machine specs?
>
>
> Thanks
>
> -Carl
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:28:21 -0400
> From: Brian Cottingham <spiffytech at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Netflix streaming through guest OS?
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>
> Message-ID: <4ACCA585.4070900 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
> I have done this with both Windows XP and Windows 7 guests. The playback
> performance is decent with the Netflix player operating inside the
> browser window on my 3-year-old laptop. I expect fullscreen player
> performance would be fine on a more modern machine with a real graphics
> card and hardware virtualization support.
>
> Dell Insporin e1405
> Core Duo 1.66 GHz
> 3GB 533MHz RAM
>
> -Brian

I am considering doing something similar. My roommate has a
subscription to Netflix. He purchased the (windows only) app PlayOn
(http://www.themediamall.com/playon/) which allows you to stream
Netflix (also Hulu, CBS, YouTube, CNN, ESPN etc) to Xbox etc. In our
case we have XBMC installed on the Xbox and it works really well, in
fact it's a whole lot more usable than Boxee is on my appleTV (which
is god awful slow).

Previously my roommate has been running PlayOn on his windows laptop
but we have an always on Debian 5.0 server/gateway which I was
thinking of running virtualbox on. The hardware is Athlon 64 3200+
with 1 GB of memory (no AMD-V extensions) so I'm not sure how well it
will work. The system is basically headless and X less so I was
thinking of running virtualbox in a vnc session.. is there a way to
run virtualbox w/o X? It would be nicer I think.

Any other hurdles to overcome with the above? I haven't had the time
to hook it all up.

John Brier



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