Documenting solution as it was difficult to find. The OpenGeo (GeoTools) toolkit provides a helper utility for checking whether the libraries are installed via it's ImageUtilities.
In summary:
- check for the following class
com.sun.medialib.mlib.Image
- check that it's not disabled via property:
com.sun.media.jai.disableMediaLib
- Instantiate
com.sun.medialib.mlib.Image
and executeisAvailable()
Code is available via LGPL [ http://svn.osgeo.org/geotools/trunk/modules/library/coverage/src/main/java/org/geotools/resources/image/ImageUtilities.java ]