It’s been a happy few weeks. Right before the Christmas holidays, Qt Jambi was nominated for the Jolt awards (”the Oscars of the industry”, we’re more or less nominated for an Oscar, tell your friends), and, as you may well be aware, Qt 4.4 will ship with the excellent Phonon Multimedia framework as announced in the beginning of December.

For those of you who hadn’t heard, the Phonon framework is a cross-platform class library which can (among other things) enable your application to play any media files supported by a system backend. By default, this backend is Microsoft DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux and QuickTime on Mac OS X.

Now, where it makes sense and is possible, we make the Qt Jambi APIs “identical” to the Qt APIs. This means that if you have experience with one framework, you should be able to learn the other one with very little effort, granted, of course, that you already know both programming languages well enough. In fact, porting examples from Qt for C++ to Qt Jambi (which I’ve done a fair number of times by now) is primarily a search/replace of arrows to dots, and is so simple it’s comparable to what scientists call “doing nothing.” The latest addition to Qt Jambi 4.4 is the com.trolltech.qt.phonon package, and this blog is mainly a celebration of the fact that I just finished porting the Media Player demo from C++ to Java, and that it works.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief low-res video of what you can expect. It shows the Qt Jambi media player running through Eclipse, the application playing a movie, and me moving some sliders to alter the brightness, contrast, saturation etc. of the movie stream. I forgot to turn off my microphone, which is why the audio is terrible, so please disregard that.

That’s it. I hope you find it impressive and I hope you will have some use for it when Qt 4.4 and Qt Jambi 4.4 are out later this year.