With all the hoopla around the release of VM player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ I decided that I would try to install R5A16 into a Virtual Machine. There are many sites explaining how to do this including Hackaday http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000153064739/ I succeeded doing an auto install and creating a frontend on my W2K machine (Athlon 2500+) It sort of works, I can watch SDTV with a little bit of jerkyness. I wouldn't even try HDTV. I think the problem is the video driver. I can see in the output of mythtfrontend -v all that it is using software to render the screen. XFConfig-4 uses vmware as it's video driver. I gather from my searching around that vmware emulates some graphics card. Supposedly you can figure this out using VMtools, but the copy I downloaded won't install.

Anyway here are my steps.
1) download and install VMPlayer
2) download qemu-0.7.2-windows.zip http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~kazuw/qemu-win/qemu-0.7.2-windows.zip
3) extract qemu-img.exe from the zip
4) run qemu-img.exe create -f vmdk FILENAME SIZE
where filename is the name of the virtual disk you want to creat and SIZE is the size in Gigs. Don't worry, it only uses the space it needs, it doen't create a 10G file. It expands as you add stuff to your virtual machine
5) create a file with a vmx extension in the same directory as the disk image
6) This is what's in mine

two important things the line ide0:0.fileName = "knoppmyth.vmdk" points to the disk image you created. and the line ide1:0.fileName = "f:\KnoppMythR5A16.iso" points to an iso image on disk. if you wan't to install from CD read the hackaday stuff

7) Run vmplayer and choose the virtual machine you just created.

At this point you should see the Knoppmyth CD image and it should run like normal from there. I choose to use bridging mode and gave the knoppmyth install a unique IP.

vmplayer is really cool, I also created an ubuntu vm that works really slick. I've been splitting my time playing with knoppmyth and it on my w2k box

_________________
FRONTEND 1 - R5A16, Athlon 3000+, NVidia Motherboard, SB live, GeForce 5200, AA 9A60
FRONTEND 2 - R5A16, Athlon 2500+, Nvidia Motherboard, SB Live, GeForce 440MX, TV-OUT
BACKEND - R5A16, Althon 1700+, Nvidia MB, 2- HD3000's, 450GB LVM partition