virtualbox.org

So I've used Virtualbox and VMware for a while to do regular business apps and whatnot. But lately I decided I wanted to use it for netflix since I'm on an Ubuntu host.

Well it worked, but was choppy. So I ended up getting a new computer with a core i7 processor with 12gb of ram. I installed an xp guest and the video was sorta choppy. Audio was perfect though. So I decided to change the hal so all 7 cores would show up in my task manager on the guest XP system. They show up now, but the video is just as choppy, and now the audio stutters a lot. I have allocated the guest system with 3gb of ram, vt-x, 128 mb of video memory, direct 3d access, and nested paging.

Any ideas on why the audio is choppy now that I have all seven cores enabled?

Did you install the Guest Additions to get rid of the choppy video? It should provide you with a faster video frame rate, but it's still dependant on the speed of the CPU inside the VM for decoding the file you play. E.g. video will always be choppy in a VM if you're playing an h.264 file, as it's too heavy for decoding. Most, if not all, decoders are single threaded, meaning they won't use the additional cores available.

As for your choppy audio, you had no problems on the same system if you selected only one core for it?

Yeah, guest additions was installed.

I changed the hal back to a uniprocessor system and the audio is much better. It still chops a bit here and there, but nowhere near as bad as before.

But overall, I would expect netflix streaming to be better than this on my VM.

Another thing, I tested out different audio streams in firefox. Youtube, netflix, pandora, etc. All of them had pretty horrible audio with all 7 cores enabled.

When I set the affinity for firefox to just one core, the audio is okay. You can hear a slight amount of stuttering, but it's alright. Any more than 1 core enabled for firefox and I get a lot of audio screw ups.