Media Player Lifecycle and Events

Summary

The several different states that a Player instance goes through in processing and playing media data allows developers to gain control over these states, provide feedback, and process events at these stages. These states are UNREALIZED, REALIZED, PREFETCHED, STARTED, and CLOSED, and the transitions between them are well defined and accessible.

In this chapter, you learned the background behind these states, the how and why of the transitions that take place between them, and how to respond to the various events generated during these transitions. You learned to create an event handling class and also how to listen to custom events.

The next chapter will introduce you to accessing media data over the network using MMAPI, a task that must be handled efficiently and cleanly for responsive multimedia MIDlets.