JavaFX Video – Another Me Too Campaign in the Old, New Media War

I spent a little time checking out (high level) JavaFX multimedia capabilities. You can actually boil Sun’s entire JavaFX campaign down to a single 1 second sound bite (watch video excerpt below – full video found here).

According to Sun, they have the full support of any multimedia codecs installed on the native system as well as an on2 codec embedded within the runtime (see video quote below to hear their words for yourself).

Native codec support is sort of a mixed bag of control vs utility. JavaFX wants to do everything for every system even if that means you are effectively writing system specific code and delivering uneven experiences. If you manage to actually get the JavaFX runtime installed (no mean feat) you’ll be confronted by a wonderful security dialog which seems to ignore attempts to always trust the cert.

Once you’ve run the gauntlet of JavaFX impediments, you can actually watch some “native” (h.264 .mov files) overview videos playing inside JavaFX. The problem is that the rendering of these videos is far from native–any scrolling or resizing of the browser causes the video to stop rendering (a white rectangle is painted during these movements). I’m also surprised to see Sun using MPEG4-AVC / h.264, but not using aac audio. If you’ve got native codec support why use a crappy audio codec in your videos? The video below illustrates the rendering and audio issues (3 asides: 1) I’m bound and determined to ruin AfterEffects cartoon effect–look for me to overuse it and misapply it, 2) watch in fullscreen mode for 1:1 clarity, and 3) listen half way through to hear one of my kittens snoring).

If you ever wanted evidence of how important video is today, you need look no further than than the gigantic amounts of money Adobe, Microsoft and Sun are sinking into media centric runtimes. Like Silverlight 1.0, the initial JavaFX offering is a half-baked “me too” stab at capturing some video glory. Sure media has been a glaring hole for Java and I can appreciate how all the development platforms in the universe need to provide easier development and enable richer experiences, but so far I’ve been disappointed by the same ol’, same ol’ offerings from Microsoft and Sun. I’m sorry, but “hey look at the same stuff on my platform” isn’t innovative or visionary. As we watch Detroit’s “big three” burn out, I wonder if there aren’t lessons to be learned in our own industry as the nascent “media three” rise (maybe it should be w3m–web three media).

The Ethics of Screencasting in the Read-Write Web Era

While watching a Charlie Rose interview of Lawrence Lessig I was particularly struck by the description of our uneven legal / ethical handling of copyrighted text content vs digital media.

Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.

Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.

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Breaking With Old Media

Thank you Michael Rosenblum for reminding me of all the possibilities.

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