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Showing posts from January, 2011

And the solution...

Well, this one wasn't the toughest by any stretch. But it does highlight some weird syntax that's possible (though highly frowned upon.) Rather than putting the square brackets that signal the return type is an array straight after the return type, these can also go after the method declaration. So it's exactly the same as: public class Test{ public byte[][][] functionArray() { return null; } } So yes, it compiles and runs fine. It's a bit of a weird design choice this one - these days it's just there for backwards compatibility, and even the JLS goes so far as to say it shouldn't be used in new code. So stay away from writing it, but if you see some weird old code like this then don't be too shocked :-)

Java and video

One of the possible future features I've always had in mind for Quelea is decent video support. The ability to import and display avi or mkv files, or to play a clip seamlessly from a DVD. This isn't really something I'd done previously, so I was interested to see the options available. All things considered, I thought that it's such a common thing to want to do there must be one or two good, well accepted libraries around at handling all of the media side of things. I was wrong. Very wrong! Considering that I want a cross platform way to do all the above, the amount of options available are considerably limited. The classic one is the JMF, which is probably the best option around. This doesn't mean it's good however - it's woefully outdated, the APIs aren't the best to work with in the world by a long shot and every other question about it asked online seems to end up with something along the lines of "wow, you're using JMF? Good luck..."