Playback control of audio/video files and streams is managed as a state machine. The following diagram shows the life cycle and the states of a MediaPlayer object driven by the supported playback control operations. The ovals represent the states a MediaPlayer object may reside in. The arcs represent the playback control operations that drive the object state transition. There are two types of arcs. The arcs with a single arrow head represent synchronous method calls, while those with a double arrow head represent asynchronous method calls.