Windows 8 and RemoteFX

[foxwood]

I was playing around with Hyper-V in the Wndows 8 preview yesterday - I took a harddrive from an XP machine that I had retired 3 years ago off the shelf, plugged it into a USB adabter and used Disk2VHD to create a disk image. Once it was created, I made a new VM and connected it to the VHD, and it booted up just fine, with now complains about incompatible hardware (except the logitech Quickcam drivers which went into some sort of re-install loop). Reactivated Windows XP, and everything is working.

But that reminded me that I had read something last year on MissingRemote about using remote desktop to watch Live TV using a technology called RemoteFX, when the Media Center running as a Hyper-V VM, and I also came across this MSDN blog post about Enabling a Seamless Multimedia Experience with RemoteFX Media Streaming in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

Has anyone done any testing of Media Center on Windows 8 and Remote desktop access?

[erkotz]

I believe to get RemoteFX, the VM needs to be Windows 8 and it needs to be a VM on a Server 2012 PC.

[foxwood]

Yeah, as I read more, it seems that Windows 8 will have the "client" part of RemoteFX, and the the version of Hyper-V in Windows 8 doesn't seem to support it. I'm also reading some pages that suggest that only Windows 8 Enterprise VMs can actually take advantage of this (in other words, you'll have to be remoting into an Enterprise desktop to actually get all that streaming goodness, even if the VM is hosted on Windows Server 2012).

Oh well, I'm still impressed with Hyper-V. I've never had a P-to-V be as smooth as this one.

[bigjohns97]

server 2012 hypervisor layer not needed, I just went from wireless win8 laptop to wired win8 desktop at home and I watched an hd youtube video and couldn't tell the difference.

[bigjohns97]

1080p mkv is a little choppy but better than transcoding streaming options, also could be bandwidth limitations as I have consumer cable at home and client is on wireless.