Lately we've had some customers inquire about using LEADTOOLS Multimedia 18 with the Cloud SDK. This is a perfect choice since the conversion of audio/video files is what originally sparked the creation of our Cloud SDK. LEADTOOLS Multimedia V18 gives distributed processing application developers the most flexibility, features and performance with the latest codecs, processing filters, and the option to use either DirectShow or Media Foundation. This combination sets up LEADTOOLS as the unrivaled choice for parallel processing of multimedia conversion tasks.

In case you're new to the LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK, its greatest asset is the freedom it gives developers. While we include demos for OCR and Multimedia since those are the most popular kinds of distributed applications among our customers, the Cloud SDK is actually a completely independent framework. You don't have to use LEADTOOLS Multimedia, OCR, Image Processing, or really any LEADTOOLS imaging feature. LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK simply makes it easy to divide any job amongst an unlimited number of networked computers and get your job done faster and less expensively.

This post is part of our 2017 Developer App Series, which showcases apps created by our Support Agents over the course of eight weeks. These apps are intended to be larger, more thoughtful apps with highly practical purposes in mind, as opposed to a basic "how to" for a feature.

App Description

This project from Amin will utilize two of the LEADTOOLS Callback filters to combine multiple videos into a single video output. It uses the RGB filters, the Video Resize Filter, and the Still Image Reader filter. The UI provides allows the user to add more than two videos as well as setting the order for combining them.

The two most commonly used video compressions are AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265). The majority of HD broadcasting, video sharing, mobile streaming, and digital surveillance use either an H.264 or H.265 video compressor. We all remember saving videos to our PCs and how much disk space they would take up as well as how long they would take to upload for sharing. Converting those videos with the LEADTOOLS H.264/AVC compressor will decrease the file size by roughly 30% and converting with the LEADTOOLS H.265/HEVC compressor drops the file size by nearly 60%. You may be thinking, "Well, it's been saved at a lower bit rate, so the quality must have dropped". That is not the case though. These compressors will maintain the same visual quality as the original, so there is no need to worry. With everything being recorded at much higher resolutions - 2k and 4k - these days, the H.265 compressor is a better solution than H.264. Many of the online streaming sites have encoded their videos with H.265/HEVC compressors, which helps to greatly reduce lagging and dreaded "buffering" message.

Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that trains computers to interpret and understand the visual world. Using digital images from cameras and videos and deep learning models, machines can accurately identify and classify objects — and then react to what they “see”. LEADTOOLS is built upon nearly 30 years of programming and patented AI algorithms dealing with the understanding of images and videos. When it comes to putting computer vision into practice, we’ve got you covered!

Today, LEADTOOLS released an update to its Multimedia SDKs that enhances support for several formats and streaming capabilities. These improvements are all geared towards extending our support for various technologies as they emerge on the market, and in speeding up the overall process of streaming audio and video data to clients.

• Added support for h.265 and h.264 hardware encoders to MP4 and MKV outputs
• Added support for MP3 audio to MP4 and MKV outputs
• Added support for MPEG-2 audio encoder to MKV output
• Improved capture device support
• Added the ability to use Microsoft RTSP media source using windows media extensions, with implementation of network source authentication interfaces

This update is freely available to any existing LEADTOOLS Version 20 customers and is included in the latest Multimedia SDK download.