ZoneMinder Forums

Has anybody successfully run ZoneMinder inside a virtual machine on a Windows Server 2003 or Server 2008 box?

I currently have a Windows Server for my TV tuners and a Linux server for ZoneMinder. It works well (although at almost 10 years old the machines are sometimes a bit kranky about power up after a power failure) but I'd ideally like to get just the one system. I've looked into replacing ZoneMinder with a Windows-based solution and nothing comes close; similarly nothing on Linux comes close to DVBViewer (MythTV isn't suitable for me).

I can see two possibilities for going about this:
1) Use USB analogue tuners with virtual USB controllers. VirtualBox and VMWare seem to support sharing real USB hardware with a virtual machine, but so far my attempts at getting this to work have failed.
2) Use PCI tuners with a Windows-side app to take the composite input and stream as MJPEG. This can theoretically be added as a psuedo-IP-Cam within the virtual ZoneMinder.

It is this latter approach that I'm pursuing, but again I seem to have hit a brick wall because I'm unable to find anything on Windows that can stream MJPEG from a TV card.

So my question is - does anybody know of an application that can take the input from the standard WDM-compatible TV tuner and create a real-time(ish) MJPEG stream?

I have testing ZM inside a Vmware server runing over winXP. But only for testing purposes, because all virtual servers has a deplorable performance

the statement "all virtual machines have deplorable performance" is a bit harsh. VM's are used in enterprise enviroments all the time and in a lot of conditions the performance is not an issue to say the least.

As for Raw USB forwarding both vmware server and workstation do support these natively and it should work with virtually all USB devices. There shouldn't be anything special you have to do as long as:
A) you can get the usb device to work in a normal linux box (and do the same config on the linux quest)
B) You have vmware tools installed in the vmware linux guest
C) You attach the USB device to the linux guest in vmware

Deplorable performance, anyway, is entirely relative. I wouldn't recommend trying this with a large ZM installation on the VM, unless you had the hardware underneath the VM to back it up. But a couple-few USB cams shouldn't be an issue if your hardware can handle it. You said it's 10 years old, but I'm assuming you at least have a couple of processors, that tends to help.

Drive storage should be taken into consideration. Ideally you'd have the windows box and the vm writing images to different drives, not just different partitions. That seems to be the biggest bottleneck I've run into with running VM's of other things on top of a linux install running ZM, but I imagine it works the other way around.