A big part of my move from Windows to Linux has been finding replacements for the applications that I had previously used day-to-day that are not available on Linux. For the major applications like my web browser (Firefox), e-mail client (Thunderbird), password manager (KeePass2) this hasn’t been a problem because they are all available on Linux as well. Heck you can even install Microsoft Office with the latest version of wine if you wanted to.
For something to do I decided to see if I could create a very simple Java media player. After doing some research, and finding out that the Java Media Framework was no longer in development, I decided to settle on GStreamer to power my media player.
GStreamer for the uninitiated is a very powerful multimedia framework that offers both low-level pipeline building as well as high-level playback abstraction. What’s nice about GStreamer, besides being completely open source, is that it presents a unified API no matter what type of file it is playing.
