Video in Java, no more JMF please, use JavaFX!

I often get email from people asking me to help them with playing video in Java using JMF & FOBS, probably because of my post from last year: playing-flash-video-flv-with-java

The reason why I'm writing this is to make it clear to people that time has moved on since last year, and the long awaited Java Media Components framework which was annouced a few years ago has finally hit the shelves as the media playing capability built into JavaFX. So rest assured, you don't have to hack your way around JMF to integrate FFMPEG to play all your movies.

Just follow this link to the JavaFX samples website, there are plenty of better ways to play video in Java than a year ago. But you'd have to use JavaFX for that, don't worry JavaFX is simple and runs under Java so it integrates well with a regular Java app/applet.

JavaOne 2008 was great

I finally found the time to sit down and write about my first JavaOne. I had to catch up a lot of work that piled up during the last few weeks before JavaOne while I was rushing to get the JavaFX version of Parleys.com out for the Technical Keynote of Bob Brewin. If you weren't there you can watch it again, it's around 1:09 when Stephan Janssen (founder or Parleys.com / JavaPolis) presents the application.

I know I promised code samples during my technical session, but I haven't had the time to write about them. This will happen over the next few weekends, so stay tuned! In the mean time, people interested in the slides from my session can watch them below.

First of all I'd like to thank all the people I met at JavaOne for the interesting conversations and invites to cool after parties. I had a great time, learned a lot and met some awesome people. I'd also like to thank Sun for the opportunity to show my work during the keynote, it was a pleasure to see it on the big stage and to work closely with the people behind the scenes of the JavaFX Compiler, Runtime and GUI library to get it done in time.

I went to an interesting presentation on "Distributed client-server persistence with JPA" by Alexander Snaps, another Belgian guy I met at the Sun BeLux party. With his framework he tries to solve a huge need in desktop Java, transparant online/offline data persistence. I'd like to see this evolve into a full featured framework, and maybe even contribute to this if I can find the time. Having developped a similar mechanism for a client, a flexible framework for this seems like a huge timesaver for new client-server projects. Although some people believe everyone is online all the time, this is unfortunately not true in practice.
Jasper Potts and Richard Bair of the Nimbus and SwingLabs teams showed their latest work on the "Nimbus L&F". It not only looks better out of the box, it's designed to be flexible for us and the designers. Hottest item of their show was the designer tool, I'm anxiously waiting to try it out. It's basically a vector drawing tool that generates Java2D painter code to feed directly into Nimbus.
Ben Galbraith filled in for Shannon Hickey and Chris Campbell for "Extreme GUI Makeover" and he did a great job. He rewrote the GUI for a mainframe textbased financial application, with nice gradients, animations and rich usability improvements. All the sourcecode can be found here. Thumbs up!
Finally I attended "Filthy Rich Clients, Filthier Richer Clientier" by our friends Romain Guy and Chet Haase. Although the technical content wasn't so surprising to me, it was a hilarious session. They floored me when they pulled off the Flex book trick, gotta give it to 'm, they have a huge sense of humor.
The JavaPosse BOF was great also, lotsa loughs and beer, it was fun!

Bottom line my first JavaOne was a great success, hope to see you all next year!

Playing Flash Video (FLV) with Java

*** Update: Read this post first!! ***

Today I was challenged by one of my coworkers to be able play an FLV movie inside a Java client (Swing) application. Well it seems like it's a piece of cake. All you need:

• JMF
• FOBS4JMF
• Adapted JMF.properties file
  
• .FLV file (I took one of the talks @ Parleys.com)
  

To spice up the challenge I added the player inside the ReflectionPanel from the great book: Filthy Rich Clients.
There's nothing special to it... I created this demo in about 15minutes. If you take the FOBS4JMF binary build, all you need is included and preconfigured.