StreamFab for Windows Running StreamFab Inside Win7 Hosted VirtualBox

[NewMelle]

There are a few die hard Win7 users here (I am among that number) so to run software designed for later versions of Windows I have a Win11 virtual machine set up specifically for that reason. The only two caveats is hardware depended software (e.g. Line 6 Helix or Focusrite Solo) are not supported and drive mappings must be done via the command line due to the NAT scheme VirtualBox uses. I have a Win11 micro PC set up for situations where direct hardware connection is necessary.

I've been using VirtualBox for years and years. It and the Extension pack are free and runs smoothly on Win7.

Essentially I'm running Win11 as an app instead of an OS and I don't have to trash half my paid for software to shut the "Win7 is dead! upgrade to 10/11!" crowd up . It is fairly easy to set up. I've put together a walk-through listing the steps. Setting up VirtualBox is relatively quick and easy, it's installing Winbloat 11 that takes so damn long.

http://www.therathole.org/win11-vbox/

[ms-dfav]

Nice! Which version of VBox are you using? The tutorial does not mention the version at all.

The last one I've successfully installed under Win7 is v7.0.8 - and I've noticed severe slowdown of all my VMs there, compared to v6.1 branch. Later ones wouldn't even install.

... also, for someone that would like to try this route: with VBox v7.0.8 you have to use older Guest Additions from v7.0.6 and NOT from v7.0.8, otherwise most OSes will be unstable / prone to crashing.

[ms-dfav]

Oh my! Inspired by this (not mentioning the version), I've just tried to install v7.0.18 under Win7 and it simply works! That's great news for all Win7 freaks - I've simply given up on this over a year ago, thinking that VirtualBox wouldn't work under WIn7 ever again (its not 'officially' supported for ever longer than that). The slowdowns are still there for me but it is the compatibility that matters the most.

[NewMelle]

Nice! Which version of VBox are you using? The tutorial does not mention the version at all.

The last one I've successfully installed under Win7 is v7.0.8 - and I've noticed severe slowdown of all my VMs there, compared to v6.1 branch. Later ones wouldn't even install.

... also, for someone that would like to try this route: with VBox v7.0.8 you have to use older Guest Additions from v7.0.6 and NOT from v7.0.8, otherwise most OSes will be unstable / prone to crashing.

V 7.0.18 r62988 (Qt5.15.2). Smooth as silk even with the Guest Additions installed. Pack 7.0.18. I may play around with some Linux distros but I'm not going ape. Too many guitars to play to fight with operating systems.

[NewMelle]

Got a screenshot of Win11 running in VirtualBox on Win7 with the VB versions mentioned above running SF. Now when SF abandons Win7 I won't have any issues and I only have to look at Win11 when I use SF.

Additional video resolutions were available (at 1920x1440 right now but I have a 58" 4K monitor). Audio (for SF "download complete" notifications) took a little tweaking. Neither possible without the Guest Additions.

Windows network shares are a 50-50 crap shoot but in the guest window under Devices --> Shared Folders --> Shared Folder Settings it was easy to "map" a drive to my video library for downloads. Only caveat is drive letters are assigned in reverse starting with Z which I've not found a way to change yet. You can even use mapped shares on the host as if they were local drives so you can map a video library/video download folder on a host mapped share.

e.g. \\SERVERNAME\SHARE --> Host Mapped Drive V: --> VM Shared Folder with the drive letter VB assigns.





The VMs are housed on a 1TB SSD so the VM loads quickly. I've not noticed any sluggishness yet. Time will tell.

[ms-dfav]

Additional video resolutions were available (at 1920x1440 right now but I have a 58" 4K monitor).

Provided that the guest additions are working correctly on your Win11 VM, you should also try at least two more things:
- 'View -> Auto-resize Guest Display' will adapt the VM resolution on-the-fly to the VM window which you can resize freely
- 'View -> Seamless mode' is even cooler - it will hide the VM desktop as transparent so it will look like your StreamFab is running locally. For me it looks perfectly well on Win7 VM, some slight issues with window shadows under Win10 VM. Hopefully this also works in Win11 VM. Beware, your VM window will have its menus hidden so you will need to use the keyboard shortcut 'Host+L' to exit from this mode.

There are many more viewing modes (remote ones, scaling ones, multiple monitors, can screen record, etc) and - in general - VirtualBox is very configurable and powerful (the most under-utilized and useful at the same time feature are the 'snapshots' which are similar to savegames but for the state of the VM and with branching for different adventures and quests ).

In general it has a very well done and competent 'UserManual.pdf' - reads like a fairy tale

Only caveat is drive letters are assigned in reverse starting with Z which I've not found a way to change yet.

This is very simple, you should just use a drive letter of your choosing followed by a colon under 'Mount point' like 'D:' (instead of '\' in your screenshot) and it should map the directory under the D drive letter. It works even on a 'live' VM without a reboot under Win7 and Win10 VMs - should remap the paths automatically. I don't have a Win11 VM to try it though.

[NewMelle]

The view options sound pretty cool. I'll give them a try. It is normally minimized when I'm using it. Open Shell, Explorer Patcher, WinAero Tweaker and Window 10 Shut Up make it much easier to look at though. Out of the box however....



Snapshots tend to hang or take forever. I used them quite a bit at first when the test builds of Win10 (which I had to support) were available and sometimes it worked, others it just hung forcing me to kill it. I blew a lot of things up during that period. 7Zip was quicker, robocopy even faster than that. I have plenty of disk space so I normally resort to robocopy now. It tries to create the snapshots but most of the time just sits there at 0%. Oddly Linux build snapshots almost always worked.

Never thought to use a drive letter in the mount point. I saw "Mount point" and my brain was thinking Apache. Doh. Works like a charm. Thanks!

The Additions appear to be working properly and fixed the resolution limitations and fixed the no audio passthrough problem. I still have the audio "crackle" bug but only using sound for notifications so it''s not a major issue.

I hadn't used VB in some years and it seems to be far less buggy and sluggish than it was then. There again the only guest OS I'm running is Win11 but now that I'm retired and not required to devote my spare time to familiarizing myself with work related technologies I'll probably play around with some Linux distros as well.

I did test SF in the VM and it behaved just as it does natively on Win7.

[ms-dfav]

Snapshots tend to hang or take forever. I used them quite a bit at first when the test builds of Win10 (which I had to support) were available and sometimes it worked, others it just hung forcing me to kill it. I blew a lot of things up during that period. 7Zip was quicker, robocopy even faster than that. I have plenty of disk space so I normally resort to robocopy now. It tries to create the snapshots but most of the time just sits there at 0%. Oddly Linux build snapshots almost always worked.

What you wrote there seems pretty strange - snapshots are completely VM-independent (no matter what OS you use, you can create them even before installing the OS) and the acts of creating them or switching beetween them are instantaneous - should not take more than 1 second ever and never failed for me for years. Only deleting the snapshots can take time and (temporarily) disk space: if done from the middle of the snapshot tree, then VBox will have to merge the two snapshots (differential disk images to be exact) around the point of deletion.

Also, I don't see any connection between VBox snapshots and 7Zip/robocopy, as snapshots are internal to VBox and does not require copying any files (for the user that is) - that's why I think we're talking about two completely different things. For context, the feature I'm talking about here and in my previous post is described in the manual here: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/Us...html#snapshots

The only disadvantage of snapshots is that they tend to take a lot of disk space - but in this forum people tend to have huge disks anyway, me included

Other than that - good luck! I also completely agree with the rainbow... thing you did there . As of now, StreamFab works ok on my Win7 natively but who knows what happen next? Having future-proof options is always good.

Also I don't know how would it be feasible performance-wise to replicate in VBox one trick in particular: having a lot of RAM, I have resorted to the creation of ramdisk (48GB seems enough) and forcing StreamFab to create most of its temporary files there, as sometimes it creates and then deletes thousands of tmp files per episode (especially for Disney+ and SkyShowtime) which can wear down the disks, especially SSD ones (along with my patience, as the whole OS performance tends to take a deep dive).

[NewMelle]

For one the Win11 disk is 60G. I left it for about 3 hours while I ran errands and it was still at 0%. Scoured the net and haven't found an answer yet. It's not a permissions issue. Until then robocopy. I have 10TB off to the side for storage items such as this.

I'll be sure to move the SF Temp folders to an external drive. The system I have is old and only Win7 Home Premium so I'm limited to 16GB RAM. I've stripped everything out of it I could and the upgrade to Pro still always fails.

[ms-dfav]

For one the Win11 disk is 60G. I left it for about 3 hours while I ran errands and it was still at 0%. Scoured the net and haven't found an answer yet. It's not a permissions issue. Until then robocopy. I have 10TB off to the side for storage items such as this.

I'd be glad to help you - but I'm really confused, as I still don't know what are you referring to exactly. What exactly was at 0%? What exactly are you copying with robocopy? What 'storage items' are you referring to? How it all relates to snapshots?

If you're simply saying that taking a snapshot itself takes forever then there is definitely something seriously wrong with your setup - like I said they should not take any time at all to create, no matter how big the VM disks are.

One small note, however: if you're taking a snapshot of a VM while it is running, it will create a file with a current live content of your VM's RAM (similar to hibernation, so you can go back to the VM up and running without the need of booting it up), so it may take a minute of your time - not more, though. Preferably, make sure to have your VM shut down before taking a snapshot.

I'll be sure to move the SF Temp folders to an external drive. The system I have is old and only Win7 Home Premium so I'm limited to 16GB RAM. I've stripped everything out of it I could and the upgrade to Pro still always fails.

That is definitely a good idea (second best after a ramdisk), also make sure that this external drive will be a fast one and preferably separate from the one you are downloading your movies/TV shows to via StreamFab.

[NewMelle]

Snapshot is not obvious in the main interface. It's buried just like simple Win10 settings. Click the sliders for the VM --> Snapshots --> RIGHT click the Current State --> Take, Everything is going Win10. Three dialogs deep just to change the screen saver.

Thanks to the last hung snapshot this is what I was presented with when I fired up VB again. Machine inaccessible.

Machine UUID {8a98c12b-bebe-4758-8fb9-20783ba6d117} in 'X:\VirtualBox_VMs\Win11 Fresh\Win11 Fresh.vbox' doesn't match its UUID {65b6a911-d3cc-4605-8714-14c5544c09b2} in the registry file 'C:\Users\neal\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml'.

Robocopy saved my rear there. Renamed the broken VM and copied the backup over and bingo. Back to normal. Well, minus about an hour's work but I didn't lose it all. Creating a clone took about 3 times as long as robocopy as VB is using explorer and robocopy doesn't.

I had done a clone of the machine AFTER I removed all the BS and Fugly but before I made a number of tweaks and fixes to the OS. I checked and indeed the UUIDs did not match. The UUID switched from the clone I created to the production VM. In other words the production VM had the clone's UUID. Same as the snapshot issue, Google is of zero help. I might have been able to fix it but it duplicated the UUID and I have no idea what the original UUID was.

I will try snapshots one last time from the main VB interface and if it blows up again, never again. Had to fight with the audio again. That was one of the things I tweaked after I did a backup.

I don't download hundreds of titles in a row. I space them out. That's how I got my Paramount+ account locked out. Unusual activity was what I was told.

[AGuyWithAComputer]

out of curiosity, with your main system being windows 7, how are you planning to keep using the internet?

btw the settings for things like screen saver are so buried because they are not really used any more mainstream. Defaults are to sleep the screens or the computer within 3 or 10 minutes.

[ms-dfav]

Snapshot is not obvious in the main interface. It's buried just like simple Win10 settings. Click the sliders for the VM --> Snapshots --> RIGHT click the Current State --> Take, Everything is going Win10. Three dialogs deep just to change the screen saver.

You can switch to the 'snapshots view' via clicking on the three blue dots rhs of the VM name and selecting 'Snapshots'. Afterwards you'll get dedicated buttons to taking / restoring snapshots etc. and also the snapshots tree in the center. Quite convenient... well, when it works I mean.

Thanks to the last hung snapshot this is what I was presented with when I fired up VB again. Machine inaccessible.

Machine UUID {8a98c12b-bebe-4758-8fb9-20783ba6d117} in 'X:\VirtualBox_VMs\Win11 Fresh\Win11 Fresh.vbox' doesn't match its UUID {65b6a911-d3cc-4605-8714-14c5544c09b2} in the registry file 'C:\Users\neal\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml'.

I don't know your individual case but UUID problems usually occur when manually copying VM files instead of properly 'importing' the machines from the VBox GUI. There is a dedicated 'Machine -> Add' option for that. It should ask you whether you want to regenerate UUIDs if there is a conflict.

There is a 'central' file VirtualBox.xml that aggregates data about all the currently registered VMs, all their disks UUIDs (one per individual snapshot) and machines UUIDs, among other stuff. This data is also duplicated in the VM's .vbox file and should always match. If you want to manually move VM files around you should remove the machine (right click -> Remove) and then after doing all the manual changes (like recovering the older version from backup, etc.) re-add with 'Machine -> Add'. Also, each time you create a snapshot some new UUIDs are added in both places.

The option to 'clone' from the GUI should automatically re-create all the UUIDs to not to conflict with the original, so its not just copying the files verbatim.

You can also take a pick on what disks (and their differential images) are currently registered and to which VMs and snapshots they are attached via 'File -> Tools -> Virtual Media Manager'. It also allows for a lot of operations on these disks via its GUI.

If you are sure that your VM copies are consistent, conflict-free and self-contained (not referring outside their directory, like when you do a 'linked clone'), you can try removing (not deleting!) all the machines, removing all the settings for VBox and re-importing the .vbox files for your VMs and there should me no more conflicts.

Other than that, I can strongly recommend asking directly on the VBox forums, there is a really helpful and involved community that will try to help you for sure: https://forums.virtualbox.org/index.php

They helped me numerous times there. Should give much better results than just googling the answer, as your problems are definitely not typical, especially the one with hanging snapshots. I've been using VirtualBox for over 10 years, I have currently over 50 different VMs of all sorts registered just on my current machine, with no conflicts and still: never had any problem with snapshots like you do.

Fingers crossed!

[ms-dfav]

out of curiosity, with your main system being windows 7, how are you planning to keep using the internet?

Obviously I'm not recommending this to non-technical people, but myself I feel pretty safe with connecting exclusively via the central router (so no unwanted incoming traffic), using restrictive firewall just in case and - I almost forgot - not doing stupid things (like running non-trusted software). I'm also currently considering using some heavily sandboxed browser just for the websites - will have to move to some VM for that sooner or later.

Other than that I'm also restraining myself from using non-essential software (like gaming - that's reserved to consoles, etc.), using VMs to assess the security of the software I'm interested in (including StreamFab ) which I'm doing on a different, Linux-based server (in case something trying to escape the VM).

There is always a risk but that's also true for the newer systems, and the positives (having more control, mainly) are far more important for me than the negatives, so I think it's a good compromise. Having the ability to control and restrain the software for newer systems (via VMs and snapshots) actually gives a lot more power than it seems at first. You can, for example, NOT update everything each time microsoft says so and also NOT have to deal with uninstalling anything ever (instead just reverting to the snapshot done before the installation).

The above works only for my private machines. Depending on a job - currently being almost in the center of the A.I. bubble - I usually end up being forced to use some laptop with over-engineered Win10 set up so that I cannot even connect a pendrive to it. Fortunately, there are usually ways around it, if you know what I mean

[AGuyWithAComputer]

Obviously I'm not recommending this to non-technical people, but myself I feel pretty safe with connecting exclusively via the central router (so no unwanted incoming traffic), using restrictive firewall just in case and - I almost forgot - not doing stupid things (like running non-trusted software). I'm also currently considering using some heavily sandboxed browser just for the websites - will have to move to some VM for that sooner or later.

Other than that I'm also restraining myself from using non-essential software (like gaming - that's reserved to consoles, etc.), using VMs to assess the security of the software I'm interested in (including StreamFab ) which I'm doing on a different, Linux-based server (in case something trying to escape the VM).

I meant from a TLS 1.2 will eventually be depreciated and sites won't let you connect period point of view. Not a you have no security what so ever point of view.

There is always a risk but that's also true for the newer systems, and the positives (having more control, mainly) are far more important for me than the negatives, so I think it's a good compromise. Having the ability to control and restrain the software for newer systems (via VMs and snapshots) actually gives a lot more power than it seems at first. You can, for example, NOT update everything each time microsoft says so and also NOT have to deal with uninstalling anything ever (instead just reverting to the snapshot done before the installation).

See I've never had much if any issue with updates breaking things. But I also don't install utilities that try to change the UI or have the words registry and or cleaner in the title. In my experience all of that has cause more issues than they are worth. Windows 11 is a lot better at the forced updates thing, with no intervention it's usually not more than once a month. And you usually want to reboot your system at least that often any way. Not shut down, but actually reboot it. At some point during Windows 10 shutdown became more of a hibernate. This is for faster boot times, the only time the whole OS is reloaded into memory now is during a reboot.

The above works only for my private machines. Depending on a job - currently being almost in the center of the A.I. bubble - I usually end up being forced to use some laptop with over-engineered Win10 set up so that I cannot even connect a pendrive to it. Fortunately, there are usually ways around it, if you know what I mean

Trust me, if we wanted to keep you from plugging in a flash drive, you would literally not be able to plug in a flash drive... or any USB device for that matter

Being that I am the senior network administrator where I work, and I have to maintain not just my own company, but multiple client's networks as well. Screwing around with VMs on my desktop is more of a chore now. Besides I'd let my personal Hyper-V server do it anyway.