virtualbox.org

Thanks in advance for your help.

I am running an XP host and Linux 8.04 guest on VB 2.0.2. I am passing my CD/DVD through VB and it works but movies played tend to be "jerky" as if the throughput is a bit slow. Is there a need to go through VB or can I ask Linux to mount the drive directly? If direct mount is not available, any suggestions to increase performance?

Thanks again.

The issue here isn't to do with the DVD performance, it's to do with the nature of the VBox VMM. First, this is a single processor VM and second, this VMM only supports VESA graphics so the video codec cannot use the GPU for video processing. As a result everything is done in S/W on the main CPU and with only one core available, this can cause stutter.

So I'm to assume this is the best I can expect?

If you mount DVD "passthrough" then the I/O requests are passed straight through to host OS, but as I said: I don't think this will make a material difference. No, the main limit is the computational burdon of decoding the MPEG2 stream. The VBox guys have stated that embedding OpenGL support into the VMM is in the works. With this video would run sweetly, but not firm dates are promised.