[vlc-devel] Sun, JavaFX and Mutimedia...

[Tony Anecito]

Hi JVLC/VLC Team,

As you know JavaFX 1.0 was released last Thursday. What you may not know is one of the press releases perhaps infoworld or information weekly mentioned Sun intends to get into the media business by offering app and media services using Java. I am not sure what this may bode for JVLC/VLC.

I did look closely at the multimedia capability for windows and they have added quite a few more codecs. They now support flv, mp4, mpg, avi, wms and maybe one or two I have missed. Most of the videos I have been using with an older version of JVLC/VLC (before the jna switch) do not work with Sun or ON2 codecs. Sun admitted they do not support higher resolution videos yet and I found that to be true which makes it not competitive with JVLC/VLC. I also found they did not support mms or rtp protocol but they did http. They also mentioned they will be adding video capture capability soon along with higher res video support. They do support Linux now and MAC I think.

I suspect you may have 1-3 months before Sun releases better codec support and more easy to build video examples. I did try thier new swing MediaPlayer since I have a standalone swing base Rich Client and it worked fairly well except for the mms and higher resolution videos.

They had a awesome demo of a revolving cube where you add a video to each face which is what I was looking into several weeks ago using Java2D. I know not a real life usage but it is a draw for those looking for something different and cool.

I intend to stick with JVLC/VLC for now although I could never get the new jna version to play all my videos using the MediaPlayer java object that the older version of VLC has. I have not downloaded the latest vlc code to see if the jvlc api for jna still works or if the videos I had problems with the newer vlc now work. I will try tonight.

The other tempting thing is the size of the codecs from Sun add to less that 2MB downlaod before I compress them. Which means faster download for people and faster startup something which I feel is lacking in VLC (13MB download for client/server libs) but perhaps that has been addressed?


Although Sun is only addressing Windows, Linux and MAC it is still a sizable part of your user base.


I am willing to put effort again in updating my Java Client with JVLC/VLC libraries, code and UI to battle this area but need to have JVLC/VLC support in fixing video support or understanding the issues better and lighten the download for those only interested in getting the video modules to work without needing the server side libraries.


Best Regards,
Tony Anecito
Founder,
MyUniPortal
http://www.myuniportal.com