The tremendous growth in both Java and multimedia present an opportunity for cross-platform multimedia applications. However, little research has been done on Java multimedia performance. In this paper, we present experiments that measure the multimedia performance of an MPEG-1 client in Java. We find Just-In-Time compilation, local media access and processor significantly affect multimedia performance, while choice of operating system, Java virtual machine and garbage collection have a negligible effect on multimedia performance. Overall, Java still lags considerably behind multimedia performance in C++.