The following is the way I load a video (in the actual code, the variables are member variables of the player class). I do not want the video to be played right away which is the reason I use prepareMedia(). When the application is ready to play the video, I call player.play().
However, my player view (I add EmbeddedMediaPlayerComponent to JPanel which is set as ContentPane of a JFrame) still shows the old video after running the following code with a new "videoPath" value. The player view shows the new video only after I call player.play().
EmbeddedMediaPlayerComponent mediaPlayerComponent = new EmbeddedMediaPlayerComponent();
MediaPlayer player = mediaPlayerComponent.getMediaPlayer();
player.prepareMedia(videoPath);
Is there any way I can get the player to show the new video image (or at least removing the old video image) without starting to play it? I tried calling methods such as repaint() from mediaPlayerComponent, stop() from player, in the overrided MediaPlayerEventAdpater methods such as mediaFreed(), but nothing I tried so far work.
It is a feature of VLC/LibVLC that the final frame of the video is displayed when the video ends, so you have to find a workaround.
A good solution is to use a CardLayout with two views, one for the media player component (or the Canvas used for the video surface) and another view simply with a blank (black) JPanel.
The idea then is to listen for the video starting/stopping/finishing and show the appropriate view in your card layout.
If you add a MediaPlayerEventListener and implement the playing, stopped, finished and error events you should cover all cases.
For example: in the "playing" event you switch your card layout to show the video view, in the "stopped", "finished" and "error" events you switch your card layout to show the blank view.
The view doesn't have to be black of course, you can do whatever you want like show an image.
Also note that the media player events will NOT be delivered on the Swing Event Dispatch Thread, so you will need to use SwingUtilities#invokeLater to properly switch your view.