I recently spent some time writing a simple program to play a movie file full screen on a Linux machine. I wrote the program in JRuby using the vlcj framework, which wraps the VLC media player library libVLC.
There are a number of vlcj fullscreen examples around, including an example that comes with the vlcj source code. I had not done much JRuby/Java interop work, so it still took some work for me to get this working in JRuby. To save someone else from the same problems, I thought I would share my work here.
The following script expects the vlcj jars to be in the same directory, and expects libvlc to be installed in a standard location on the machine. The first argument to the script is expected to be the path to a movie file (e.g. movie_trailer.mp4), which will be played full screen with no window decoration.
require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__)) + "/vlcj-2.1.0.jar" java_import Java::UkCoCapricaVlcjBinding::LibVlc java_import Java::UkCoCapricaVlcjPlayer::MediaPlayerFactory java_import Java::UkCoCapricaVlcjPlayerEmbeddedX::XFullScreenStrategy java_import Java::UkCoCapricaVlcjRuntime::RuntimeUtil java_import java.awt.Canvas java_import java.awt.Color java_import java.awt.BorderLayout java_import javax.swing.SwingUtilities java_import javax.swing.JFrame java_import com.sun.jna.Native class MediaPlayer def initialize library_name = RuntimeUtil.get_lib_vlc_library_name # If libvlc is not in a default search path add the path # NativeLibrary.add_search_path library_name, "/path/to/libvlc" Native.loadLibrary(library_name, LibVlc.java_class) end def play(mrl) SwingUtilities.invokeLater do play_movie mrl end end private def play_movie(mrl) media_player = build_media_player media_player.play_media mrl end def build_media_player libvlc_args = [ "--no-plugins-cache", "--no-video-title-show", "--no-snapshot-preview", "--quiet", "--quiet-synchro", "--intf", "dummy" ] # Set up the Swing UI frame = JFrame.new("Media Player") frame.background = Color::BLACK canvas = Canvas.new canvas.background = Color::BLACK frame.add(canvas, BorderLayout::CENTER) frame.undecorated = true frame.visible = true # Set up vlcj media_player_factory = MediaPlayerFactory.new(libvlc_args) media_player = media_player_factory.new_embedded_media_player(XFullScreenStrategy.new(frame)) media_player.video_surface = media_player_factory.new_video_surface(canvas) media_player.full_screen = true media_player end end MediaPlayer.new.play ARGV[0] |
This is the simplest player possible, but there are tons of options for making something more sophisticated. And thanks to JRuby and vlcj writing a media player can be done from the comfort of a Ruby program.
