Watching the Georgia Bulldogs in a Virtualbox VM running on Ubuntu
August 30th, 2008 | 
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I’m writing this post with a smile from ear to ear. I’m happy because virtualization and Internet streaming video technologiy worked together to allow me to watch the Georgia Bulldogs season opener against Georgia Southern. I’m smiling because I watched the game inside a VirtualBox Windows XP virtual machine (VM) hosted on Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop, and I did not think it would work. Not only does it work, and I mean smooth video with minimal disruptions (I used a wireless connection too), but it worked in Seemless Mode. I’m smiling from ear to ear because the Bulldogs won 45 – 21.
The football game’s broadcast was only available via the pay per view ESPN Gameplan or on ESPN360.com. I was familiar with the Gameplan package through my cable provider but I had never used ESPN360.com to watch a game. After I learned ESPN360.com was free to use for customers with AT&T high speed (and other high speed providers) I decided to give it a try. Although the media player plug in can work with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, it still requires a Windows operating system. Since I run Ubuntu at home I decided I would give it a try with my VirtualBox XP guest.
The image in this post is a screenshot of my Ubuntu desktop and the Internet Exporer 7 window in VirtualBox Seemless mode.
Pretty impressive for an opensource, hosted desktop virtualization product. I am using a Mac desktop wallpaper – don’t get confused!
I’m not sure if more of the “magic” was the result of the streaming technology from ESPN360.com or Virtualbox version 1.6.2 ‘s ability to handle accelerated graphics and video, (I later tested version 1.6.4 on another Ubuntu desktop with the same results) but it worked great. I did not modify any configuration of the XP VM beforehand. I had not done any research or even knew it could be done. I tried it and it just worked.Wow!
If you would have challenged me to combine football and virtualization in the same post before today I probably would have had a hard time. Today a virtual desktop helped me watch a college football game.
GO DAWGS!
updated 09.03.08 – added additional images of the ESPN360.com player’s modes to support discussion with Adam in comments to post.
At&T Congrats Screen
Mosaic Mode with size buttons
Full screen Mode (VM's desktop resolution is full screen size)
updated 9.22.08 – Added following screen shot of my XP VM’s setting. Click for a larger image.
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