Some USB devices are greyed out / Video problems

[Phantom360]

Hey guys, I have recenlty installed virtualbox 3.0 -- not the OSE version. My host OS is ubuntu 9.04 and my guest OS I'm using in virtualbox is Windows XP. The devices are greyed out but my printer is not, it finds it no problem. my other devices such as my external western digital "mybook" harddrives it shows up in the devices but they are greyed out. I have tried the following:

1. Edited the fstab file
2. created filters for my USB devices
3. unplugging and replugging USB hdd's

rest I can't think of at the moment....seems nothing works.

Anything else I can try, is there a solution to this...

[Sasquatch]

You no longer need the /etc/fstab trick. Now all that is needed is to be a member of the vboxusers group. I think you aren't a member of that group yet, as you have to do that manually. After I made a clean install on my PC, I forgot to add myself to it and noticed I could only add my MP3 player, but not my mouse, bluetooth or card reader. See the VirtualBox FAQ for the command to add yourself to the group.

[Phantom360]

Sasquatch, thanks man. Didn't know I had to add myself to the VB group. I have another problem however. It seems video loads or anything flash seems to load and chop and play slowly. I set aside a little over a gig for the virtual machine and set the video memory to 128, however it still plays very choppy. Its hard to edit video when its so choppy....have any ideas?

[Sasquatch]

Installed the GA? That gives a lot better video performance.

[Phantom360]

No I haven't tried that yet. I'll let you know if that helps...

[Phantom360]

hmm, seemed to help a little I guess. Everything runs pretty fast, however when I'm editing video / watching video its very choppy. The audio seems to run smoothly, its just the video that is the problem.

Also my xp can't go to 1280 x 720 now, also it doesn't go into full screen, its got black around it. If you can think of anything else I can try let me know.

[Sasquatch]

The size of the screen need to be dynamic. You can set that in the Machine menu, make sure the checkbox is ticked, else the resolution won't be updated when you resize the window or go to full screen.

Choppy video playback is usually the result of a processor that is too weak to handle it. Even if the video would run smooth on the Host, it's still going to have to go through the overhead of the VM layer when you play it in the Guest. It also depends on the resolution of the video, the codec in use and the bitrate.

[Phantom360]

Yeah that is what I figured. The processor is pretty darn old -- not sure what I was expecting. I do have another computer with a core duo, so I'll try that one out. Thanks for all your help, greatly appreciated.

[Sasquatch]

Having a core duo can help a bit, but keep in mind that unless you have hardware virtualization, only one core is available. If I would to compare my laptop, which is a core duo T2300 (1,67 GHz per core), with my PC's first processor, an AMD 3500+ (running at 2,2 GHZ), you would say that my laptop is faster, because 2x 1,67 < 2,2. But that is not the case. The VM would have only one 1,67 GHz core at it's disposal, so my PC would out-perform my laptop due to core speed. A VM on both systems would make the one with my PC as host run faster. My PC is at least a year older than my laptop.

So, if your new system would have a duo core processor, but each core isn't faster than the PC you're already running the VM on, it won't do much good.

[Phantom360]

That seemed to help quite a bit, playing videos is fine. However when I have premiere open and displaying the video in "draft" mode it still chops. Hmmm, I think I will just run a dual boot.