I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while now.  It’s no secret that Liz and I are huge fans of our Media Centre.  I mean really, who (other than my wife) asks for their own Xbox 360 as a Birthday present, then use it as an exclusive Media Centre Extender?  It’s probably the only Xbox that has never had the DVD drive opened!

Anyway, I digress.  The reason for the post, is my Media Centre hosts a Virtual Machine with Virtual PC called “Divx”.  As the name suggests, it’s primary purpose is to take the the ~220 DVDs that I own and convert them into Divxs — and this takes time and CPU.

Using VMs on my Media Centre works very well for me.

The Media Centre is almost silent, it’s on 24 hours a day, and has [nearly] more storage than I know what to do with.  My desktop however is not, I enjoy sitting at my desk with the computer off.  It’s a comfortable place to sit and read, and I enjoy having the computer off and a chance to get away from emails and feeds.

So using my home baked VM solution I combine scheduled tasks and that mighty find tool ThreadMaster.  With the these tools, I throttle the CPU usage enough so that it doesn’t interfere with mission-criticality of the regular media centre duties.  From time to time I RDP into the VM and check the progress.  By using RDP into the VM, I ensure I don’t upset anyone who may be using the Media Centre at the time.  I’m sure everyone has been in that moment and knows what I mean.  Now I know I could use Virtual Server instead of Virtual PC, but there is a certain amount of comfort in the simplicity of this solution.

I imagine one day this style of virtual machine “Home Appliance” may even become more mainstream — who knows running your own mail server in a VM on your media centre may be perfectly normal in a few years?  Or maybe Virtual Machine technology will have evolved enough to run your Media Centre in a Virtual Machine.  Who knows?

But for the time being this is working really well.  Just thought I’d share this silly little bit of trivia with everyone.