[Mplayer-users] MPlayer in Java [was: Gibraltar]

[Ulrich Kuhn]

Well, thing is this:

Video decoding and display is possible with (pure)
Java. But it's very likely not (at all) fast enough to produce feasable
output. I.e. one needs approx. 10ms to (only )display a 352x288 image on a
reasonably fast machine (800Mhz) AND with Windows. With Linux image
displaying takes much longer (30ms).

Now one can use some native "enhancements" to use hardware acceleration
and things like that.
Ie iDCT: invoke some methods of MPlayer
Ie display: use native rendering support of JDK1.3
(see http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javatips/jw-javatip86_p.html)

Of course every native part has to be done for every platform you want to
support. And if you want to support only one platform (Linux) you can of
course use directly a native program.

For our product we are doing exactly that sort of thing (some native
parts) because we want to support more than one platform and Java saves us
much work there but we want it also fast and avoid some ugly parts of
Java. So we have some (few) native parts.

Btw: I am talking about Java applications not applets. Applets were and
are never "good" and they are very likely not supported by the browsers in
future...
Btw2: There is no such thing as a "broken pointer free" program. :)

As a final word I have to mention: There is the JMF (Java Media
Framework). That does video playback (with much native parts as it seems)
and is reasonably fast (tested under Windows). It only does not replay
divx coded things yet.


Yours
  Ulrich


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