LEAD Technologies has a strong commitment to ongoing support and improvements to the current version. This isn't just the bare minimum bug fixing and workarounds like the rest, we're talking about new features and additions that are added to the toolkit at no charge or upgrade fee. Today we have released an update to the Media Foundation features within the LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK.

At first glance some of these features might not seem like much, such as a live preview for the capture and convert controls. However, anyone who has attempted low level Media Foundation programming knows this is a pretty major undertaking. The near-magical work our engineers did will save LEADTOOLS customers countless hours of headache! Here's what's new and improved for the Media Foundation SDK:

LEAD Technologies has added two popular feature requests which will be available to all Version 18 customers free of charge. The h.264 Encoder now supports Intel Quick Sync Video hardware acceleration. On supported processors, the video encoding time is typically cut in half, with an almost 60% reduction in CPU utilization.

For processors that do not support Intel Quick Sync video, customers can also take advantage of new High Profile capabilities (in addition to the already supported Main and Baseline) for improved video encoding onto Blu-Ray media.

Today we released several updates to LEADTOOLS Multimedia Version 19. In particular, the H.264 encoder and RTSP Source filter are faster and offer greater flexibility.

• NVIDIA CUDA hardware acceleration (NVENC) for H.264 encoder — NVIDIA's latest graphics cards and video drivers include even better hardware acceleration than the previous generation (NVCUVENC). H.265 support for NVENC acceleration is currently in beta and LEADTOOLS is excited about adding this support to our H.265 encoder in the future.
• Automatic timestamp drift correction for AAC and H.264 encoders — An incredibly useful feature for the TV industry. With video capture and DVR applications often running for days, timestamps can begin to drift resulting in out of sync audio and video streams. LEADTOOLS' AAC and H.264 encoders can now automatically detect and correct these problems when they arise in the capture hardware.
• RTSP Source Filter callback and MaxTimeout parameter — When RTSP streams encounter connection and load-time issues, both of these features make it possible for the client to abort the process manually or after a specified amount of time.
• YUV color space support in Video Callback Filter — Customers using the Video Callback filter can now work directly with YUV data without converting it to RGB.

All of these new features are freely available to those evaluating and who have already purchased LEADTOOLS Version 19. All you need to do is download the latest setup from our website!

We're going back to back with Multimedia Version 18 articles on The CodeProject. After showing how to create a powerful RTSP Server with only a few lines of code last month, now we're illustrating how easy it is to implement Microsoft Media Foundation Capture and Convert functionality with LEADTOOLS Version 18.

LEADTOOLS has a rich history of simplifying DirectShow application deployment with its award-winning Multimedia SDKs. Version 18 picks builds on that reputation and provides the same programmer-friendly interface and powerful features that developers can rely upon for years to come as Microsoft Media Foundation becomes more and more popular.