Question

I’m trying to create a cross-platform app in Java, using libvlc to play video. I’ve been searching the web a lot but I haven’t found any code to load libvlc independently on the platform used (Mac, Win, Linux – 32 or 64 bit). I use JNA library to load libvlc.

For example, this is the code which loads libvlc from the default installation path on Mac:

NativeLibrary.addSearchPath(RuntimeUtil.getLibVlcLibraryName(), "/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/lib/");
Native.loadLibrary(RuntimeUtil.getLibVlcLibraryName(), LibVlc.class);

But what if the user changes the installation path of VLC.app?!

So I need to create a path independent, cross-platform loading code. Generally I just don’t know where to get the path to the folder containing the libvlc library.

Thanks for any ideas.

Answer 1

thanks for your help, but I found better solution. After few hours of reading of VLCJ’s javadoc I noticed NativeDiscovery class, which has all these common paths already saved.

private void setupLibVLC() throws LibraryNotFoundException {

    new NativeDiscovery().discover();

    // discovery()'s method return value is WRONG on Linux
    try {
        LibVlcVersion.getVersion();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new LibraryNotFoundException();
    }
}

The only con of this solution is, that if the user has installed the VLC into custom location, you are still forced to ask him, where the library is.