The Media class represents a media resource. It is instantiated from the string form of a source URI. Information about the media such as duration, metadata, tracks, and video resolution may be obtained from a Media instance. The media information is obtained asynchronously and so not necessarily available immediately after instantiation of the class. All information should however be available if the instance has been associated with a MediaPlayer and that player has transitioned to MediaPlayer.Status.READY status. To be notified when metadata or Tracks are added, observers may be registered with the collections returned by getMetadata()and getTracks(), respectively.

The same Media object may be shared among multiple MediaPlayer objects. Such a shared instance might manage a single copy of the source media data to be used by all players, or it might require a separate copy of the data for each player. The choice of implementation will not however have any effect on player behavior at the interface level.