The Consumer JRE And Open Source Video Streaming
Today, Jonathan Schwartz has a great post about the power, and value, of free media. Rich media (audio and video) is an important part of this story on the Internet. Now that Sun is finally focussed on making Java applets work well for consumers – the new consumer version of the Java runtime is sheduled for early 2008 (sooner, if things go well) – it’s time that Java offered a compelling way to allow developers to deal with streaming media – both audio and video.
But isn’t that a lot of extra work? Hasn’t Sun the Java community got enough on it’s plate just to make Java work well in the browser? Surely, resources are limited enough as it is, without adding to the workload? Well, perhaps not… because the hard work as already been done. As just one example, check out the following Java applet, which streams high-quality video (it’s an 1100kbps steam), encoded with the Open video codec, Theora, and plays in the Open media container Ogg. This software already works pretty well with the latest version of Java; and it could be amazing with the new Consumer JRE, if out-of-the-box support was built in.
In the past, there have been many problems with Java and media; but the reasons for that have been, in large part, the messy IP situation surrounding popular audio and video codecs. Well what I say is – let’s sidestep all of that. Just for now, let’s forget about what formats are popular, and set the priority as making free, open media formats work amazingly well in Java. After all, if free media is the future, it might as well be built on free technology…
Peter Pilgrim wrote:
With Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 you are forced to go a website when you first use a Encoder, for example Apple H.264 IPOD
Also the H.264 is restrictive. The streaming Java applet was very impressive. Love it. If we can get an open source CODEC and video format standardised de-facto or otherwise then we will be there in the future.
Posted 13 Jun 2007 at 12:26 pm ¶