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Hi, just came across your guide and I'm eager to try it myself. I had a quick question about your XP and Vista virtual machines. You said in the guide that anyone can connect to their copy of windows from any client in the house. How is this done?

Another quick question. When you are ripping new DVDs/BluRays are you just placing them in the server's optical drive and ripping directly, using VNC on a client to manage the process?

Guest wrote:Hi, just came across your guide and I'm eager to try it myself. I had a quick question about your XP and Vista virtual machines. You said in the guide that anyone can connect to their copy of windows from any client in the house. How is this done?

To be able to run virtual machines you need to install KVM. See my KVM guide here.

I rip my DVDs/Blu-Rays using my regular (non virtual) desktop. You can use a virtual machine to do the ripping but you need to configure the optical drive on your server to be visible by the virtual machine. Have a search on google for a how-to or come back to me and I’ll try and explain.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the kvm guide

All,

I rip my DVDs/Blu-Rays using my regular (non virtual) desktop. You can use a virtual machine to do the ripping but you need to configure the optical drive on your server to be visible by the virtual machine. Have a search on google for a how-to or come back to me and I’ll try and explain.

Has anyone had success ripping a DVD in a Windows VM? In ANY virtual machine under qemu+kvm?

I'm using Windows 7 as a guest and although the VM sees the optical drive and I can get DVDFab to rip, the output is horrendous (as in you can't see anything, it's total garbage, etc... in other words, useless). When I try and watch the disc with VLC I have a similar experience. I expect there's an issue with how Qemu+KVM passthrough the cdrom/dvdrom/bluray but I'm just guessing...

I've setup a similar server to this guide. Ubuntu 10.04 server, headless, VNC4SERVER, etc. I've installed the libdvdcss2 package on the server... and I've testing ripping with dvd::rip... and that works. But I don't want to use that as my solution. I'd rather have ripping s/w in a virtual machine. And, perhaps I'm being stubborn but I'm more familiar with Windows ripping tools so my intention was to use a Windows 7 VM for media ripping (1:1 copy and encoding) and the Ubuntu 10.04 server as a host for file sharing, media serving, etc.

Any suggestions? I've researched the hell out of this issue and for the life of me can't figure out what's going wrong.

Jeremy