PC remote play using a Windows Guest VM ?

[Bejorgon]

I just tried the trial version of Crossover for Ubuntu 14.04. Its version of wine only supports windows 8, so the installer complains that the version won't work. Good idea though.

 

 

It's more that the free trial of Crossover is quite easy to install possible dependencies, so you can use the trial to figure out whats needed. Then export the bottle for Wine, or rebuild it with just the right dependencies in Wine.

Though saying that, Crossover doesn't support Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, which is needed for RemotePlay.

[DaScorpio_]

So no way to use pc remote play (yet) through a virtualbox? thats a bit disappointing but luckily I have Win 8.1 so I can use it on my main pc at home.

 

Tho I have a question. If I would leave my ps4 on, would I be able to connect to it if I am quite far away from home? (different city/country etc.) ? If yes, can I leave it on sleep mode to consume less power while Im not connected 

[sixones]

So no way to use pc remote play (yet) through a virtualbox? thats a bit disappointing but luckily I have Win 8.1 so I can use it on my main pc at home.

Tho I have a question. If I would leave my ps4 on, would I be able to connect to it if I am quite far away from home? (different city/country etc.) ? If yes, can I leave it on sleep mode to consume less power while Im not connected

You can wake it up remotely with remote play if you sleep the PS4 rather than shutting it down, you can put it back to sleep again from within remote play too!

[SnowxSakura]

It's truly a shame so many companies ignore Linux completely.

[DaivRules]

It's truly a shame so many companies ignore Linux completely.

 

If I were in a decision making capacity for a company, I would likely also ignore the free, heavily fragmented, "we just roll our own" community that I would likely not be able to monetize as well.

 

As a linux user though, I partially agree with you. I don't expect it from companies, but when I hear about any contribution to linux/BSD I get more interested in that company.

[DaivRules]

So I asked "Hey @AskPlayStation is it possible to use the new Remote Play feature from PS4 firmware 3.50 on a Virtual Machine running Windows 8.1 or 10?"

 

According @AskPlaystation "Hello there! You should be able to as long as the system meets the requirements. http://bit.ly/1MTdSYq"

 

That's keyboard monkey speak for "I dunno. Sure."

 

I don't foresee this working on VM's for a while. Bummer. 

[sixones]

So I asked "Hey @AskPlayStation is it possible to use the new Remote Play feature from PS4 firmware 3.50 on a Virtual Machine running Windows 8.1 or 10?"

According @AskPlaystation "Hello there! You should be able to as long as the system meets the requirements. http://bit.ly/1MTdSYq"

That's keyboard monkey speak for "I dunno. Sure."

I don't foresee this working on VM's for a while. Bummer.

Have you tried to use different VM software? VirtualBox is quite behind the others especially for GPU performance.

Vmware will probably run it fine, but it's quite expensive. Though you could use the free Vmware player and find a preconfigured Windows box.

[DaivRules]

Have you tried to use different VM software? VirtualBox is quite behind the others especially for GPU performance.

Vmware will probably run it fine, but it's quite expensive. Though you could use the free Vmware player and find a preconfigured Windows box.

 

Behind, huh? I've never had to yearn for more GPU performance for anything I do in a VM in VirtualBox. And VirtualBox is free so I had no reason to seek out and pay money when I had a perfect working solution already. I'll see if there are any more free VM solutions out there, and if so I'll test those. I'm not about to spend money on one. I was curious, but not *that* curious. 

[sixones]

Behind, huh? I've never had to yearn for more GPU performance for anything I do in a VM in VirtualBox. And VirtualBox is free so I had no reason to seek out and pay money when I had a perfect working solution already. I'll see if there are any more free VM solutions out there, and if so I'll test those. I'm not about to spend money on one. I was curious, but not *that* curious.

Don't blame you there, Vmware is mega expensive too. There isn't really anything else that is free, least that works on Linux.

Best bet I think is figuring out the needed codecs to run it on wine, but struggling to find away to install the Windows Media Feature pack that's required.

[GarryKE]

I don't own a PS4 but I would say it should somehow. Though I haven't seen you post anything of which graphics card and drivers you're using (free, foss, etc).

Have you looked at the logs too? I didn't see anything about those either? /var/log may have something but your Windows ought to have more than Linux does. What does it say in event log?

I don't know if the remote play feature uses DX x but I have definitely encountered problems with DirectX being emulated before so perhaps, if it does use it, have a look at any errors there and post them?

VBox, when last I used it, had an option to share your graphics hardware. Although it sounds as though your driver may not be loading, the delay may be caused by a lack of "push".

I'll be honest, you're better off with the struggle of getting it to work on VBox than you are with Wine.

Edited April 11, 2016 by GarryKE

[DaivRules]

I don't own a PS4 but I would say it should somehow. Though I haven't seen you post anything of which graphics card and drivers you're using (free, foss, etc).

Have you looked at the logs too? I didn't see anything about those either? /var/log may have something but your Windows ought to have more than Linux does. What does it say in event log?

I don't know if the remote play feature uses DX x but I have definitely encountered problems with DirectX being emulated before so perhaps, if it does use it, have a look at any errors there and post them?

VBox, when last I used it, had an option to share your graphics hardware. Although it sounds as though your driver may not be loading, the delay may be caused by a lack of "push".

I'll be honest, you're better off with the struggle of getting it to work on VBox than you are with Wine.

 

I'll admit you are probably looking for the technical reason it's not working. I'm of an age and experience point where a standard VirtualBox install in Mac OS X and Slacker Linux with a minimal messing of configuration is all the time I allot to mess with this kind of stuff. If I were somewhere in my twenties and probably my early thirties, I'd probably even pull an all-nighter or two looking into this stuff. Getting modems and video cards configured in Linux in the mid to late 90's was fun for me then, not so much anymore.

 

As it is, I'm extremely confident it has something to do with the video processing and it's likely some kind of codec the VM doesn't possess. I'l try it again in three months with whatever the new driver package is and then again three months after that. We have advanced computer technology enough that I now expect something like this situation to work with minimal effort. If it doesn't, I can live without it. I still have OS X I can fall back on, as that is actually supported.

[GarryKE]

Coincidentally, I happen to be in my mid-20s and would happily pull an all nighter to find a solution hehe.

Fingers crossed you get it working at some point.

[Grizzle-bizzle]

You would be better using Crossover or Wine to do this rather than trying to run it inside a VM, you should just need to install the Windows Media SDK inside a Wine bottle and then the Remote Play. If your struggling, download a free trial of Crossover and give that a try, the installer is very automated and should offer an easier way of figuring out what dependencies are needed.

 

Wine would be the best outcome, better than a VM for sure - but apparently Remote Play requires something called Windows Media Feature Pack (I assume it is looking for this because it has some codec needed) and that is apparently problematic because it comes in a MSU package.

 

Here's a link I found that talks about the MSU related issues. Apparently some of them use a proprietary MSFT compression scheme that is not supported so it can't unpack the files:

https://www.wine-staging.com/news/2015-12-22-release-1.8.html

 

If it is a compression algorithm issue I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to unpack the thing and get Wine to install from the unpacked version.

Edited April 12, 2016 by Grizzle-bizzle

[sixones]

Wine would be the best outcome, better than a VM for sure - but apparently Remote Play requires something called Windows Media Feature Pack (I assume it is looking for this because it has some codec needed) and that is apparently problematic because it comes in a MSU package.

Here's a link I found that talks about the MSU related issues. Apparently some of them use a proprietary MSFT compression scheme that is not supported so it can't unpack the files:

https://www.wine-staging.com/news/2015-12-22-release-1.8.html

If it is a compression algorithm issue I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to unpack the thing and get Wine to install from the unpacked version.

It's not possible to unpack the MSU manually, it's a Microsoft encrypted installer I believe so won't ever work on Wine.

I've tried to manually copy out the feature pack dlls from a Windows installation and made some registry hacks that should make the feature pack available on Wine but the remote play installer still doesn't detect it's installed.

I'm thinking it might be possible to run it by skipping the installer and copying the installed files for remote play from a Windows installation. Should also be able to run DependencyWalker on the app inside a normal Windows install and see exactly what dlls it uses.

The feature pack seems to include codecs for video, guessing these rely on hardware video decoding so it doesn't work in VirtualBox.

Edited April 12, 2016 by sixones

[sixones]

Got a bit closer getting it to run under Wine, manually copying over the Remote Play installation folder from an actual Windows machine and copying over a bunch of dlls to Wines System32 allows RemotePlay to run but it fails to connect to the network without any helpful error.

[markcavan]

So good news in a way.  I tried VMWare Workstation 12 Player -> https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/12_0 using a Ubuntu 16.04 host and Windows 8.1 guest (with VMWare tools installed into the guest) and remote play works surprisingly well.  I set the display via VMWare to use accelerate 3D graphics and I assigned 1GB of graphics memory.

 

My graphics card is an NVIDIA Corporation GK107GLM [Quadro K1100M].

 

Still no solution to VirtualBox but I'm investigating if PCI passthrough might work -> https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#pcipassthrough but so far I've been unable to get it working.

Edited June 2, 2016 by markcavan

[sixones]

So good news in a way.  I tried VMWare Workstation 12 Player -> https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/12_0 using a Ubuntu 16.04 host and Windows 8.1 guest (with VMWare tools installed into the guest) and remote play works surprisingly well.  I set the display via VMWare to use accelerate 3D graphics and I assigned 1GB of graphics memory.

 

My graphics card is an NVIDIA Corporation GK107GLM [Quadro K1100M].

 

Still no solution to VirtualBox but I'm investigating if PCI passthrough might work -> https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#pcipassthrough but so far I've been unable to get it working.

 

It won't work in VirtualBox, if you do get it to work it won't be very usable and most likely just show a black screen. VirtualBox has a very limited graphical renderer, you would need to use something commercial like Parallels or VMWare Workstation that has a decent graphics card implementation. Unfortunately for GPU based tasks, VirtualBox is lagging quite behind the others, though what do you expect when its free!

[markcavan]

It won't work in VirtualBox, if you do get it to work it won't be very usable and most likely just show a black screen. VirtualBox has a very limited graphical renderer, you would need to use something commercial like Parallels or VMWare Workstation that has a decent graphics card implementation. Unfortunately for GPU based tasks, VirtualBox is lagging quite behind the others, though what do you expect when its free!

 

I suspect you are right.  Yes VirtualBox is free and open source so hopefully in time they will add better graphics rendering.  VMWare Workstation Player from what I can see is also free for non commercial use so that may do me fine as I only use Windows for a very limited number of activites.  I will need to eventually move my Window 10 VM from VirtualBox into VMWare if I decide to stick with it and an initial export and import between them did not work.

 

I have to say however its pretty cool playing a PS4 using remote play on a Windows guest using VMWare all then running on a Ubuntu host.  You gotta love technology really.

[sixones]

I suspect you are right.  Yes VirtualBox is free and open source so hopefully in time they will add better graphics rendering.  VMWare Workstation Player from what I can see is also free for non commercial use so that may do me fine as I only use Windows for a very limited number of activites.  I will need to eventually move my Window 10 VM from VirtualBox into VMWare if I decide to stick with it and an initial export and import between them did not work.

 

I have to say however its pretty cool playing a PS4 using remote play on a Windows guest using VMWare all then running on a Ubuntu host.  You gotta love technology really.

 

I think VMWare Player is free but after the Pro trial you won't be able to create new virtual machines unless you pay for it, so as long as you create your Windows guest before your trial runs out you shouldn't need to buy a copy of VMWare (at least for non-commercial use). 

 

Hopefully one day VirtualBox will catch up for gaming / graphic intense apps!!

[w4lln3r4d4m]

I could make it work in VirtualBox 6.0.12 on Ubuntu 19.04 with integrated Intel graphics.

I just changed the graphics driver oi VBoxVGA under the screen settings page. It works with VMSVGA as well, but with that the autmatic screen sizing is not worked for me. VBoxVGA shows a deprecation warning, and it will be supported only till v6.1. 

Also changed the network to bridged mode.