Blu-Ray in VMware

[misteralexander]

To what extent does VMware support Hardware? Ex: I have a "Top End" system that has Linux as it's Host & Win7 is run virtually. To what extent will the virtual Win7 be able to use & utilize the Blu-Ray drive? Could I install PowerDVD 9 in the virtual machine & play a Blu-Ray movie? I'm asking becuase Blu-Ray support is next to nothing in Linux.

[Bernd_Nowak]

To be honest I don't know if it's possible but because I have recently checked some stuff for blue ray on my own Windows 7 host and have found the following problems without virtualisation:

graphic card should be able to decode codecs VC-1 und H.264in hardware so I don't believe that the virtual graphic card adapter is able to deliver this because at the moment in a typical windows host/guest enviroment performance of any special stuff is not good.

sound (typical 5.1) and the stereo creative soundblaster in the guest

Like I said, I'm no expert but I tend to say that blue-ray is not possible in a virtual guest now. Maybe with a next release. But I'm a noob so maybe some kind soul has has a better answer.

[vanRijn]

Sorry I don't have any helpful hints/suggestions to add here, but I wanted to add that I'm very curious to see if you've tried this or had any success yet? =:)

[admin]

Unfortunately the BluRay (and HD-DVD) DRM is problematic. The guest has no way to establish a secure path to the display as we don't have any secure way to pass the display keys back up into the guest particularly on the linux platform where anyone with a copy of GDB and a second machine could sniff them out of the kernel. Our display device is also missing features that would be required to implement any sort of protected-path video output. Its probably unlikely, even if we could get all those components working, that we'd be able to convince Microsoft and whoever else that were safe enough to be worth of a device key. I'm also not sure about the other side of the equation, namely getting sufficiently low level access to the drive to allow it to give you the keys. You might need to pass the drive directly through as a SCSI device but, again, I'm not 100% certain as I haven't tried it.

Beyond the DRM issues, I don't think there's anything stopping a high end system with a discrete video card from playing 720p or even 1080p video in a linux host. We handle the colour-space conversion quite well and there should be enough processor power on current Core2-class systems to handle the H.264 decode. I haven't personally tried VC-1 but I don't imagine it would be any more problematic.

[misteralexander]

Sweet! This is exactly what I had been waiting to hear. Thanks so much. I'm in the process of purchasing a custom build. 975 Extreme Edition (3.3Ghz), DDR3 12GB 1.6Ghz, Nvidia Quadro (1GB) . . . I'm sure my system COULD have done all it wants, but now I know (for the meantime) to just stay with DVD-+RW. Thanks!

-Alex.