Criticism and Alternatives
Many JMF developers have complained that the JMF implementation supplied in up-to-date JRE's supports relatively few up-to-date codecs and formats. Its all-Java version, for example, cannot play MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Windows Media, RealMedia, most QuickTime movies, Flash content newer than Flash 2, and needs a plug-in to play the ubiquitous MP3 format. While the performance packs offer the ability to use the native platform's media library, they're only offered for Linux, Solaris and Windows. In particular, MS Windows-based JMF developers new to JMF often expect support for some newer formats on all platforms when such formats are only, in fact, supported on MS Windows.
While JMF is considered a very useful framework, the freely available implementation provided by Sun is suffering from a lack of updates and maintenance. JMF does not get much maintenance effort from Sun; the API has not been enhanced since 1999, and the last news item on JMF's home page was posted in September 2008. While JMF is built for extensibility, there are few such third-party extensions. Furthermore, content editing functionality in JMF is effectively non-existent. You can do simple recording and playback for audio and video, but the implementation provided by Sun can do little else.
Platforms beyond those that Sun provides support to are left to their corresponding JRE vendors. While Sun still provides a forum for discussion of its implementation, there have been several efforts to implement open-source alternatives.
Read more about this topic: Java Media Framework
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