PCI TV Tuner cards in VM's??

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farscapesg1

2[H]4U
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As I get more and more hands on with VMWare at work, I've been thinking about my home setup. Is there any way to set up a virtual system to see PCI cards like TV Tuners? I would love to build a new server at home to run several VMs (one as a WHS with SageTV, a Server 2003 box for AD control, and a couple test VMs).

Are there any Virtual Machine applications (I know ESX and ESXi doesn't) that support PCI expansion cards, specifically TV tuners?
 
Interesting question. I can't see the purpose for doing such a thing unless someone was doing software development on tuner software (like creating some new media center type of application). I guess I'd answer that unless the VM has native support for such hardware with the default drivers, you're probably not going to get much luck.

If they're USB based there's a possibility, but for PCI cards, that would be very interesting to find out, definitely.
 
I was wondering about this too.

I recently setup a mythtv backend and was hoping to be able to do it through a vm on my existing server since it was in a perfect location and had the storage available locally. I wasn't able to find any VM that will allow this though and had to use another box.

You can pass through USB devices however, so USB tuners might work.
 
Also, look at the HDHomerun - its a network based TV tuner for digital broadcasts (atsc and QAM) - I played with MythTV in a virt box using my HDHR box.
 
Yeah, got an HDHomerun which I like, but Comcast keeps cutting more and more of their clearQAM channels around here :mad: When I get around to getting a couple HDPVRs to record from Comcast HD STBs it might not be as big of an issue, but for now I'm still using a couple Nvidia DualTV tuners for my SDTV recording....

Hmm, well I guess I'll have to just plan on building it as a WHS server and give up on running AD at home (not that I really need it since I'm replacing 3 XP computers with SageTV extenders).
 
My experince with VM's is that only USB devices can be passed through, but almost all my VM work is in the security field. I don't think you can access any PCI cards though.
 
i was looking at this with interest to have a VM Vista Ultimate running on my WHS so it would have VMC in order to record tv and such.....

hmm, maybe do the opposite, install Vista Ulitmate and do a virtual WHS install..


good question OP
 
Adidas4275 said:
i was looking at this with interest to have a VM Vista Ultimate running on my WHS so it would have VMC in order to record tv and such.....

hmm, maybe do the opposite, install Vista Ulitmate and do a virtual WHS install..
Click to expand...


If you plan on using VMC (vista media center) this would be your best bet. If you wanted to keep your OS licensces down to a minimum, SageTV supports running on WHS natively
 
yeah but i dont like sagetv

the vmc interface has a higher WAF in my house
 
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