JavaFX Media - JavaFX 1.2 Application Development

Java Reference

In-Depth Information

How it works...

While playing audio only requires the use of the classes Media and MediaPlayer , playing

video requires an additional class called the MediaView . It is of type Node and can be used

to display the content of a video on the screen. Let's take a closer look at the code:

F The MediaView —the first major component to be initialized is the MediaView

assigned to variable player . The code uses the MediaView instance to configure

the dimensions and the location where the video will be rendered. In order to control

playback, the code assigns the player.mediaPlayer property an instance of

MediaPlayer, used to control playback. MediaPlayer is then assigned an instance

of Media (through the property MediaPlayer.media ) to specify the location of the

video resource we want to playback.

F The controls —the GUI controls in this example work the exact same way as described

in Playing audio with MediaPlayer . We use a group of image icons to represent

playback functions play, pause, and stop. When the play icon is pressed, it is starts

playing the video by calling the player.mediaPlayer.play() function and

toggles itself to the pause icon. When the pause icon is pressed, it pauses the video

using function player.mediaPlayer.pause() . Finally, when the user presses the

stop button, it makes a call to player.mediaPlayer.stop() to stop playback and

toggles the play button back to the play icon.

There's more...

Processing video is expensive. The JavaFX MediaView class supports properties which can

be used to provide rendering-time hints to maximize playback performance. These Boolean

properties include:

F compositable:Boolean—if —if true, other nodes may overlay the MediaView node

using transparency.

F preserveRatio:Boolean—if —if true, the aspect ratio of the video is preserved when

the node is resized through the fitWidth or fitHeight property.

F rotatable:Boolean —when true, it allows the MediaView node to receive rotation

requests through the rotate property.

F transformable:Boolean —the node will only apply transformations through the

transforms:Transform[] property when this is set to true.