I am planning an application that will display video in a swing frame. It has to run on both Mac and Windows. I believe I should be able to bundle libvlc with the application and use vlcj to display the video.
However, is libvlc platform independant and is it a good solution for this type of application?
In short, yes. If you're just displaying a single video then it's really quite simple to use, and should work on both Mac and Linux without a problem.
From the pretty extensive research I did (and my needs were more complex than yours) I outlined it as the best available solution at present.
A side note, it may be that in the future (with Java 8 and JavaFX 3) we see much more extensive video support in JavaFX directly, which IMO would probably make that the best option if your requirements are simple. Something to look out for.