Hi guys, I'm trying to get video playback acceleration to work for me in my WinXP (32 bit) guest running on Ubuntu 11.04 (64 bit) host, with VirtualBox 4.1.2.
I've attempted several approaches for this based on howtos, tutorials and documentation I've found from Oracle, but haven't really had success yet.
With my dual core Athlon 64 X2 5400+ processor, I get halfway decent playback of Netflix videos, full screen running at 1920x1080, but it's really not quite good enough for me to want to frequently watch in there and that's about my only practical option for playing NF on my large TV at the moment.
I figured if I could just get even part of the benefit I see in native Linux from using my video card's VDPAU acceleration, it would probably make it totally watchable, if this is in fact possible. I know many people have reported successfully getting 2D and 3D acceleration to work properly in the Windows guests, but for me it's not quite happening.
I have tried installed the 3D option from the Guest Additions from Safe Mode, I've tried the latest (though now around 2 years old) WineD3d installer from here:
http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/
and I ever when through the ungodly mess of trying to compile the latest wine-git version of those DLLs myself and installing those. All to no avail. Normally, when I've installed these things and I use dxdiag to try to detect whether Windows thinks acceleration is working, I get nothing. I also have tried the Alt+Shift+Left Click menu option while playing back NF and you can see in there I guess whether Silverlight is using accel. or not.
VDPAU is working fine for me on Linux with my Nvidia GT 240 discrete PCIEx card running on a Biostar TF7050-M2 motherboard, as I've tested it in MythTV. HD playback generally settles down to around 20% CPU usage as compared to more like 70 - 80% without it.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone reading this has had success with what I'm generally describing and has any ideas. Am I missing something obvious like something I need to install or verify is working on the host side before this will successfully pass through to the VB guest?
One other note I'll make is that when I gave up last night, and tried to back out all of my changes and redo the Guest Additions install, with the 3D option from safe mode, and tried again (I think it was after that step), I finally actually saw 3D accel. enabled (do I actually need *3D* accel for video playback? why not just 2D?), but the playback was much worse then in NF than it was with no accel. at all! Frame rates in that NF popup AV stats deal were 10 - 15 fps with 10 - 15 fps dropped, compared with no accel. stats of more like 20 - 24 fps with 5 - 10 dropped normally.
Just thought I'd check on the latest status of this since oddly it seems like most posts I was finding in my research were from 2009. Thanks.