Watching NCAA March Madness in a VirtualBox VM hosted on Kubuntu
March Madness in VirtualBox
Once again I am using a VirtualBox VM to help me watch a streaming sporting event on a Linux host. This past football season I was Watching the Georgia Bulldogs in a Virtualbox VM running on Ubuntu, and this time I am able to watch the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament from a Windows 7 Beta VM hosted on Kubuntu. Similar to my scenario before, Firefox is an unsupported browser for the streaming game broadcasts available from cbssportsline.com. I needed IE so I started up my Windows VM and started watching the games.
Here’s some quick details about my setup.
- Host OS is Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE 4.1.4 desktop
- I am using VirtualBox version 2.1.4
- VM has 512 MB of RAM with the video memory set to 128 MB
- VM uses a single vCPU
- VM has Intel VT-x, nested paging, and 3D acceleration enabled
- VM is running Windows 7 Beta
The video stream is surprisingly smooth with occasional, but very brief, periods of choppiness. I’ll attribute this partly to the fact that I am wireless and the ads on the web page contain random animation.
I wish I was as happy about my bracket as I am about VirtualBox!
Here is a screen shot of the VM settings. Continue reading
