Play video in swing (VLCJ without VLC)

Question

How can I play a video in swing with the library vlcj without having vlc installed?

What I have done:

1: Downloaded the vlcj library, vlcj 2.4.1 (zip) and add all to build path: (docs1)

2: Downloaded the libvlc.dll and libvlccore.dll and put them in project folder: (docs2)

(docs3)

3: Downloaded a sample video from http:(here video) and put it in project folder: sample_mpeg4.mp43: (docs4)

I then created the following class to show the video in swing:

public class MediaPlayer extends JPanel {

// Declares our media player component
private EmbeddedMediaPlayerComponent mediaplayer;
// This string holds the media URL path
private static String mediapath;
private JPanel panel;

public MediaPlayer() {
    String projectPath = System.getProperty("user.dir");
    String vlcpath = projectPath;
    mediapath = projectPath + "\\sample_mpeg42.mp4";

    // Check if the .dll is correct
    File f = new File(vlcpath + "/libvlc.dll");
    System.out.println("VLC PATH CORRECT: " + f.exists());

    NativeLibrary.addSearchPath(RuntimeUtil.getLibVlcLibraryName(), vlcpath);
    mediaplayer = new EmbeddedMediaPlayerComponent();

    panel = new JPanel();
    panel.setLayout(new BorderLayout());
    panel.add(mediaplayer, BorderLayout.CENTER);
    setLayout(new BorderLayout());
    add(mediaplayer, BorderLayout.CENTER);
}

public void play() {
    mediaplayer.getMediaPlayer().playMedia(mediapath);
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    MediaPlayer mediaplayer = new MediaPlayer();
    JFrame ourframe = new JFrame();
    ourframe.setContentPane(mediaplayer);
    ourframe.setSize(720, 560);
    ourframe.setVisible(true);
    mediaplayer.play();
    ourframe.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
}

}

But getting the error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to load the native library. The error was "Unable to load library 'vlc':...

Do I need to have something else/more then the libvlc.dll and libvlccore.dll?

Answer 1

A typical VLC installation on Windows goes in "Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC".

In that directory you will find libvlc.dll and libvlccore.dll.

You will also find a "plugins" directory with a lot of sub-directories containing shared libraries for video/audio decoding and playback, as well as other things like LUA support, media meta-data support, service discovery, the vlc GUI, and so on.

You need those shared libraries too.

In principle you do not need all of those shared libraries, you just need the ones required to play your media (you may not be interested in LUA for example, nor the vlc GUI so you could remove those).

In practice, the difficulty is in working out precisely which sub-set of the shared libraries you need (there's no definitive list describing which plugin is needed for which purposes) so I expect most people just redistribute all of them.

You do need to be careful what you redistribute, because while most of the VLC plugins are now licensed under LGPL, not all of them are.

Answer 2

Minor addition to the answer by caprica. I moved VLC folder contents to {project.dir}/lib folder, removed everthing except dll files and plugins folder. I still faced the exception with an output "Vlc plugin error, No plugins found". I found as issue here, which mentions that new jna version included in vlcj versions 3.10.0+ messes with VLC plugin loading.

Solution: either include vlcj version 3.9.0 as a dependency, or as I did, pull the vlcj source from github, and in vlcj pom.xml change the jna.version from 4.1.0 to 3.5.2, run 'mvn clean install' and use this local vlcj artifact in your project with this version(to avoid confusion in the future between local repo and maven repo, change vlcj version to 3.xx.xx-custom or similar, so local artifact will be used always).

In the code, add custom path like this:

NativeLibrary.addSearchPath(RuntimeUtil.getLibVlcLibraryName(), "./lib");