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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peter Mee" data-source="post: 1104661" data-attributes="member: 143574">Hi MarkIt's taken me many years and not a few false starts to get to that point and as you probably know, it's never done. I'd hate to calculate how much I've spent over the years but I put it down as a hobby!!In my system, there's a single physical box (one motherboard, one PSU) that contains lots of hard drives for media storage. The operating system is unRaid, a linux-based OS that's designed to allow really any old combination of hardware to be configured as a NAS.The latest version of unraid allows for the creation of virtual machines (VMs). This means that you can set up a second (or more) operating system on the same physical hardware. These can be windows, linux or any other operating system,Usually, when people set up VMs like this, the actual UI (i.e. Windows) is displayed in a window on the host system or accessed from other PCs via VNC , remote desktop or similar. So essentially, you have a main/host OS with a monitor and the virtual OS, while independent of the host, runs in a window in this screen. You'd usually use the host system mouse and keyboard as well. Often, virtual machines will suffer from poor performance in areas such as disk i/o (as it' emulated), graphics etc.(the guest OS is 'installed' to a virtual disk file that resides on the host systems hard drive)Now, some hypervisors (the software that enables VMs to run on a host system) have the ability to 'pass through' hardware devices from the host system. That is to say, a sound card, or a usb device can be accessed by the virtual machine which sees it as if it were a physical device in a physical system.The cool thing here is that graphics cards (gpus) can be passed through to the virtual machine, meaning that the virtual machine can address the graphics at native speeds allowing for video playback, gaming etc..Now, the above is somewhat oversimplified but essentially, what this means is that with powerful enough hardware, for the cost of an extra graphics card (and OS if using windows on our vm), you can run multiple machines in a single box. (note that hardware passed through is exclusive to the VM, so if you wanted to run two VMs simultaneously with dedicated graphics, you'd need two GPUs etc.)Now, to answer your questions;With this set up, there's no need for client hardware at the TV. You simply connect the HDMI out from the dedicated graphics card to your receiver or TV and you have picture and sound.There is one caveat: your display must be within HDMI cable reach from the system. I'm fortunate in that I have 3 screens all within about a 20' cable run from a particular point in my attic.If your display is further away, this won't work and you will need a client device connected to the same network.As to your second question, the VM is for all intents and purposes a fully functioning PC. With a powerful enough graphics card and the correct allocation of memory and CPUs, you could play pretty much anything you like. It behaves just like an independent system.So, there's great savings in system build costs, running costs and general maintenance. But there's a good deal setting up involved so it's not for the faint hearted - and we haven't even discussed software yet!Happy to answer any questions.Peter</blockquote>

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