Note: For those that don't want to read through the post and just want the patch for MKV support, you can grab it from this ticket , or here if you don't have a JIRA account. Background One of the predominant things lacking a "nice" approach in the Java world for years now has been good media support. Oh sure, we had JMF, but anyone who ever had the misfortune of using that will I'm sure understand why that never really took on. (Yes, it really was that bad.) A few other approaches came and went, most notably Java Media Components - but none ever made there way into core Java, and for a long time it became pretty de-facto knowledge that if you wanted any form of comprehensive media support in Java, you used a cross-platform native library, perhaps with a Java wrapper. However, when JavaFX 2 came along we were provided with a new, baked in media framework that provided this functionality on the Java level! This is a massive step forward, sure it uses GStr...