virtualbox.org

For reasons I haven't worked out yet involving DMR, you can install MS Silverlight on several versions of Windows and Ubuntu, but only XP and above are able to play movies from Netsflix on your monitor. That means I had to add XP as another client, install Sliverlignt, so now I can see movies... sort of.

The first problem is that the volume on the client side is only about half that of the host side, so you jack both sides up full volume just to get midrange sound through the speakers. I tried a MS LifeChat LX-3000 stereo head.mike set on hand,
but it does a terrible job, because the sound through the headphones is intermittent, cutting in and out constantly, and even generates a bit of an echo.

What I was wondering is if any other users of VirtualBox and XP client have tried something similar and has found a headset that just plain works better, preferably one that connects via USB, because that would also make it compatible with my laptop. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Oh, an added tip: Go to Sounds in the Control Panel, save your existing sound theme under a name like "sounds", then leave the new sound choices blank and save that under something like "quiet". You have just deactivated Windows' clicks, beeps, and whatever, but you can still play music and video tracks and hear what is recorded on them.

I'm still waiting and hoping for an answer. I need a pair of USB stereo headphones that don't get all choppy when used with a Windows client. The pair I have is very bad about cutting in and out when used with the client. Yet the sould through the speakers is fine, except very low volume. I'm hoping attached hearphones will make it acceptable for hearing music and watching video.

I've already run up against the problem of not being able to play Netflix Watch Instantly movies at all under the Linux host, but the will play for the Windows client. I fiound one claim of enabling DRM playback under festy fawn, but no one else has succeeded. I tend to suspect that keeping Linux out of the ball game was a deliberate act, easily done at the programming level by verifying the OS and patch levels applied and letting only the approved few see the movies. Others
hope that some mix of packages in Linux additions will prove otherwise, but it isn't happening, at least not yet.