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Some words on Java & Video …

September 22, 2006 on 8:37 am | In Dev, General, Multimedia, Software |

Including multimedia capabilities in a Java applications has led many developers to the Java Media Framework (JMF). Although it nicely integrates with the Java VM it has one major drawback: The JMF has to be installed by the user and cannot be packaged with an application as jar file or library, as it is not pure Java. Furthermore the API is not very intuitive. Professional alternatives are rare. On the one hand developers can use the Quicktime Java library, which allows the integration of Quicktime functionality in Java applications based on native calls. As with JMF the Quicktime libraries have to be installed on the target system. Another option is the use of SWT. To integrate multimedia functionality for example windows media player can be called from within an SWT widget. Unfortunately there is no Windows Media Player on Linux host systems, so another alternative has to be found. And there we found the major drawback of SWT: While windows is supported very well, Linux and especially MacOS support is not productive (yet). Furthermore it is assumed that a decent media players and libraries are pre-installed at the target system.
To summarize above findings: None of the above media frameworks is able to be bundled with a Java application, Web Start or applet, as it is not pure Java. The behavior of all three alternatives differs on different platforms, whereas JMF and Quicktime behave best. However Quicktime has no Linux port, so no real platform independent solution will be possible. SWT on the other hand works on all platforms but needs native calls, so that is another problem and not very platform independent.