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Playing Media with Java Media Components

  • Feb 27, 2009
Recognizing media's importance to the Web, Sun Microsystems announced the Java Media Components project, which had the goal of providing basic media playback support for JavaFX applications. In this introduction to JMC, Jeff Friesen presents a basic media player and drills down into JMC to create experimental media players that show you how to introduce a custom control panel and brand each frame of a playing video. Jeff closes by introducing an advanced media player with a slick-looking and dynamic control panel.
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Playing Media with Java Media Components

Recognizing media's importance to the Web, Sun Microsystems announced the Java Media Components project at its 2007 JavaOne conference. The initial goal of this successor to the stagnant Java Media Framework project was to provide basic media playback support for JavaFX applications. A future goal is to support video capture. (For a backgrounder on Java Media Components, check out former Sun employee Chet Haase's Media Frenzy blog post.)

NOTE

About JavaFX: If you're unfamiliar with JavaFX, Sun Microsystems has created this technology suite to simplify the development of portable rich Internet applications that run across desktops, mobile devices, television sets, and more. Check out javafx.com to learn more about JavaFX.

Although Java Media Components provides the foundation for the JavaFX media classes, you can also use this technology with Swing applications, and that is the focus of this article.

You'll first learn how to obtain JMC for your Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux platform. You'll next explore a simple Swing-based media player that provides a brief introduction to the JMC Playback API.

After touring this API in greater depth, you'll explore an advanced version of the basic media player that incorporates a more interesting user interface.

NOTE

Fixing codec problems on Windows platforms: If you're working with Windows Vista/XP/2000 and experience problems when attempting to play back media via JMC, there's probably something wrong with your installed codecs. For example, I've experienced a problem where I could hear the audio portion of an AVI file without being able to watch its video. Furthermore, I couldn't play back MP4 files. If you've experienced similar problems on your Windows platform, you might be able to fix them the same way I fixed my media problems—by installing the Combined Community Codec Pack.

I built and tested this article's code with Java SE 6 Update 7 and key JMC files from the JavaFX 1.0 SDK. Windows XP SP3 was the underlying platform. You can download the code here.

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