virtualbox.org

I've installed an XP guest on Windows 7 host but if I try to play any videos on youtube it pretty much does nothing (no video, occassional snippet of sound) and if I try and play anything in iPlayer it just locks up and then I either get a page that says an addon crashed or that IE8 has crashed and needs to be shut down.

I've got 128MB Video Memory assigned to the guest and both 2D and 3D Acceleration ticked. I've tried both with and without the Guest Additions 3D driver installed but it's the same either way.

I've had it working OK (but not perfectly) before with a different XP guest, so I know it should be working better than this, but I don't really know what to try.

few ideas:
1. disable 2D+3D acceleration
2. try other browser: FireFox or Chrome.

With just 3D or both 2D and 3D acceleration disabled, I at least see the video, but it jumps forward about 5 seconds every second instead of playing normally.

Tried with both IE8 and Opera.

Can anyone help me get this working. It seems a bit strange that there's pages discussing 3D acceleration and I can't even play a youtube video!

128MB of video for an XP guest is a waste. Set it to no more than 16MB or 32MB.
Also running video streams in a virtual guest is very cpu intensive. Make sure that you have enough RAM and as few things running on the host as possible.

You can also post the guests log file (as an attachment) so we can see if there is anything else that can be done.

OK. I reduced the VRAM to 32MB and the youtube video played at normal speed, albeit without any sound. I had MediaPortal playing LiveTV on the Host at the time, so maybe Virtualbox couldn't play sound because of that, although it should be able to share the device. Further testing suggests perhaps not being able to play sound/access the sound device may actually be the reason why the video played normally, so issues with the sound driver/device might be worth looking at.

I next tried putting the VRAM back to 128MB and re-testing, still with MediaPortal playing LiveTV, which caused the entire PC to lockup and I had to do a hard reset.

After rebooting, I put the VRAM back to 32MB and tested, this time without MediaPortal loaded, and the youtube video was back to skipping 5 seconds every second, and no sound mostly (I'd get about a second burst after maybe 10 seconds), so it's obviously not reducing the VRAM that got it working the first time, which is why I suspect it might be something to do with the sound device.

With the attached logs, as far as I can tell VBox.log.3 is my first test with 32MB VRAM, VBox.log.2 is when I tested with 128MB (and it locked up my PC), VBox.log.1 may have been me just booting the guest with 128MB VRAM after rebooting and without MediaPortal running to see if it still locked up the PC and VBox.log is after reducing the VRAM back to 32MB and testing without MediaPortal running.

Just wondering if anyone's had a chance to look at the logs yet, as I still can't play videos in the browser.

I had to change the network for my Thinstation Vbox from NAT to Bridge the other day in order to download/install Thinstation, so I tried doing that for the XP guest as well but it didn't help.

Use Windows native for playing games and multimedia.

If you have the guest additions installed in safe mode on xp and the host uses the newest vga driver, then there is nothing else you can do.

Some thing works, others not. And you have the scond product.

Well it doesn't look like anyone's looked at my logs yet, but I've fixed this myself now, although it involved me reinstalling XP.

After doing a fresh install, I compared and noticed the non-working one was using Intel AC'97 - Sigmatel Codec, whereas the fresh install that could play video/sound just fine only referred to Intel AC'97. I tried updating the non-working one with the latest Realtek AC'97 driver, but that just causes the Virtualbox to lock up and then BSOD, so I guess I'll just start from scratch with my fresh install. It's not like I'd installed much in the broken one anyway.