USB TV Tuners in the Windows Guest (Kworld and Avermedia)

Discussions about using Windows guests in VirtualBox.
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butlerm1977
Posts: 7
Joined: 23. Jun 2009, 16:54
Primary OS: Ubuntu other
VBox Version: OSE Debian
Guest OSses: XP SP3

USB TV Tuners in the Windows Guest (Kworld and Avermedia)

Post by butlerm1977 »

Running Windows XP SP3 (guest) on a Ubuntu 32bit (host) 9.04 with Virtualbox 2.2.4 r47978. I'm really trying to get USB Tuners to work inside of the guest. I run into the same problem each time. The USB tuner is detected by the guest, and proper drivers are installed, but when I scan for channels it finds nothing. I run into the same problem with both the Kworld KW-UB435Q and the Avermedia AverTV Hybrid Volar MAX.

I read another post on here talking about getting an error during a scan mentioning a USB bandwidth limitation. I have not seen any kind of error during a scan. It doesn't freeze or anything, it just doesn't find anything.

I've tested both the tuners on physical hardware and I can pull 30+ ATSC channels. I've also tested the tuners in a virtual environment on Windows 7 using VirtualPC. With VirtualPC I can successfully scan and detect channels in a Windows guest environment. I'd rather, if possible, stay with a linux environment for my host.

Right now for testing, I'm working with an Intel E8500 as my processor with 4GB of DDR3.
butlerm1977
Posts: 7
Joined: 23. Jun 2009, 16:54
Primary OS: Ubuntu other
VBox Version: OSE Debian
Guest OSses: XP SP3

Re: USB TV Tuners in the Windows Guest (Kworld and Avermedia)

Post by butlerm1977 »

Update to this thread...

I've changed motherboards and now I'm using a supermicro server board with a Xeon X3220 quad core with 8GB ram + Nvidia quadro nvs 290 with 256mb video ram. Using Ubuntu 9.04 server, upgraded Virtualbox to version 3.0.2. This time around I've installed Vista as a the guest OS. I've successfully installed the USB Avermedia Hybrid USB tuner within the guest. When I try to scan for channels within vista media center, it finds nothing and reports bad signal strength. While the scan is taking place, I can see activity on the VM console indicator bar (at bottom of vm) that the device is being used.

If I open perfmon (within the guest) I can see the usb activity at around 13.5 being reported on the counter: "% of total bandwidth used for iso", every time the scanning switches to another channal, that counter drops to zero, then shoots back up to 13.5 when the next channel start. No other USB activity is being reported when this scan is happening.

I've tried this with both the Windows Update version of the driver, and the latest driver available from Avermedia.
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