Your CPU & RAM requirements are also largely incompatible with “No CD drive” — anything above a Core 2 Duo is definitely seen as a power user laptop, and they’re all going to come with DVDRWs.

The above points are both solved by some laptops that let you swap out the CD drive for a secondary battery, though these are rare. I think Eric’s HP tx2000 has this option (though it fails the rest of your criteria).

Above all, sad as it is to say, I think your OS requirement is the most limiting factor. Few OEMs take Linux seriously because there just isn’t the demand and won’t be in the forseeable future. There isn’t a big enough section of the market that specifically wants Linux but doesn’t know how to install it themselves. There are a few companies out there that take OEM machines, whack Linux on them and resell them, but that then becomes more expensive than just buying a Windows machine and doing it yourself.

Incidentally, don’t be tempted to drop your keyboard requirement and get a Mac. The lack of Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/Delete still annoys me, and I’ve had a MacBook for a year and a half!

Or is there a framework on OSX that a plugin could be made to wrap? Though without an OSX box I can’t really test anything.

…

Just done some more quick reading… I can only find JMF stuff for OSX, so that might be the best option. Alternatively, could try and find the VLC for Java stuff.

Cminion mentioned he might be able to write a plugin for OSX, so I am sure you can figure it out between you :D

Music vs. video playing is a tricky issue with a complex media player, as video requires a space to play – which could be in any aspect ratio – whereas music doesn’t, and works best as a horizontal bar. Various apps have worked around this by:
* Having the video area stay open, playing visualisations (Windows Media Player)
* Shrinking the window (Media Player Classic) -probably not sensible with your multiple views
* Replacing the big playlist window (iTunes) – is there really no way to move the editor elsewhere and put a viewer in instead, or put the video in a new editor tab?
* New video window (iTunes, Banshee etc.) – but not everyone likes this.

Seek bar across the top / bottom is by far the most user-friendly way of doing things, but you’re right in that this will be confusing with multiple players. Is *anyone* ever going to want multiple players, or would it just be easier to ban them?

That said, I’m getting a lot of IOException: Resetting to Invalid Mark. I think this is just MP3SPI freaking out at bad encoding, as MusicMan throws that one a lot too. (I feel kind of hypocritical actually putting that in your bug tracker when it’s still not resolved in mine!)

Incidentally, there’s no need to relinquish copyright over the work for any licence that I know of!

It should hopefully be a reasonable example of how to do native MP3 support in Java. MP3SPI/JLayer definitely seems to be a good option, though it’s really picky on badly-encoded files. Tritonus is also used in places, I never really got to the bottom of whether JLayer fully replaces it or not.

I moved to JAudioTagger for tag reading/writing as JLayer’s functions are slow as all hell when you’ve got 25,000 to do!