If you hold your breath waiting for a Java API from Apple you will
most likely die. Best bet, get a group of developers together to use
JNA to create a java binding on Quicktime X.
Or join the Rococoa project, <https://rococoa.dev.java.net/>, which
already has a partial wrapper of Cocoa working, including some QTKit
support.
Apple, if you're listening, get a developer release to us real soon,
then we'll do the work for you and help you save Quicktime.
Otherwise the likes of ffmpeg (MPlayer) will start kicking your ass.
I'm sorry, I can't agree with this warning/threat. Right now, the
simple playback leader is Flash video, because of a very compelling
deployment story. What will be interesting is the effect of getting
the HTML5 <video> tag supported in more and more browsers -- there's a
large class of developers that only needs playback and maybe a little
bit of interactivity ("on click, go to time x"), which is easily
supported with JavaScript. This works today in Safari and the WebKit
nightlies (Firefox too, I think?), and with WebKit, you could put that
kind of approach in a Dashboard widget, among other things.
The one catch I see with <video> is that we may not get a single
format that you can count on being available everywhere, and it will
suck if you have to use script to sniff the client and dynamically
write the tag (H.264 for everybody but IE, and some stupid Win-only
format for IE).
Anyways, this is where I think a lot of the basic playback and simple
interactivity audience is going. I don't see ffmpeg -- or for that
matter, that absurdly irrelevant On2 thing that JavaFX is adopting --
being real useful or important in the face of that.
