Java Media Framework - Versions and Licensing

Versions and Licensing

An initial, playback-only version of JMF was developed by Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and Intel, and released as JMF 1.0 in 1997. 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 notable exceptions are Java applets and Java Web Start, which have access to the full JMF in the web browser's or appletviewer's underlying JRE.

JMF 2.0 originally shipped with an MP3 decoder and encoder. This was removed in 2002, and a new MP3 playback-only plug-in was posted in 2004.

JMF binaries are available under a custom license, and the source is available under the SCSL.

The current version ships with four JAR (file format) files, and shell scripts to launch four JMF-based applications:

• JMStudio - A simple player GUI
• JMFRegistry - A GUI for managing the JMF "registry," which manages preferences, plug-ins, etc.
• JMFCustomizer - Used for creating a JAR file that contains only the classes needed by a specific JMF application, which allows developers to ship a smaller application.
• JMFInit

SJMF 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. JMF 2.0 offers performance packs for Linux, Solaris (on SPARC) and Windows.

In January 2011, Tudor Holton of Bentokit Project released a Debian package for the JMF to alleviate difficulties that had arisen over time when installing the JMF on Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux. This package does not contain the JMF, but presents the user with the JMF License, retrieves it from the Oracle website, and then installs it. A similar Debian package installer for the JMF MP3 Plugin was also built in February 2011.