This optional package, which can capture, play, stream, and transcode multiple media formats, extends the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) and allows development of cross-platform multimedia applications.
JMF 2.0, developed by Sun and IBM, came out in 1999 and added capture, streaming, pluggable codecs, and transcoding.
JMF is branded as part of Sun's "Desktop" technology of J2SE opposed to the Java server-side and client-side application frameworks.
The current version ships with four JAR files, and shell scripts to launch four JMF-based applications: JMF is available in an all-Java version and as platform-specific "performance packs", which can contain native-code players for the platform, and/or hooks into a multimedia engine specific to that platform.
A Manager class offers static methods that are the primary point-of-contact with JMF for applications.
While JMF is considered a very useful framework, the freely available implementation provided by Oracle is suffering from a lack of updates and maintenance.
These include: The following example shows an AWT file-selection dialog, and attempts to load and play the media file selected by the user.