Java: Linux’s New Best Friend?

The lack of ability to legally play Web-based multimedia content is probably one of the greatest obstacles to mass-adoption of desktop Linux.

Currently, Java isn’t used as the basis for displaying a lot of multimedia content on the Web, but that could very easily change, especially with a Java Virtual Machine re-write by the community to optimize it for multimedia content, and some tweaking of the Sun Java Web Start code. If the codecs ran under an open source JVM and could be licensed legally, a lot of the media problems would be solved. Audio and video codecs would download on-the-fly, and the JVM would handle all of the work required to set up the environment and play the content.