Streaming video is the norm these days. Whether watching a movie or TV show from one of the many services out there, catching a quick laugh or how-to on YouTube, or watching some promotional video on a company's website, we have all come to expect media streaming as a way of entertainment and education. Consumers (and I will admittedly put myself into this group as well!) are usually picky about the quality of their playback. Buffering? Stuttering playback? Chances are you just lost interest.

As a web developer, server administrator or content provider, how do you serve up streaming audio/video content? YouTube can be a solid option but not for everyone as many companies prefer to host it themselves and not rely on any third party. If you choose to host your own streaming media, you now have to make sure you can support all of your clients' devices and browsers and convert the videos accordingly or risk some clients being unable to play your video.

The LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ cross platform libraries in LEADTOOLS V18 have been very popular since their release earlier this year. LEAD continues to expand its reach by adding new development platforms and interfaces for Windows Phone 8 and Linux.

Click on the headers below for more a more detailed list of all the features supported by each interface.

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.

Displaying multi-page documents in a zero-footprint web application can be a challenge because of the limitations associated with the <img> tag, which can only display a single image. A common solution is to implement a separate thumbnail viewer and attach JavaScript listener events to change the displayed image in your main "viewer." A more advanced solution may involve detecting the scroll position and modifying the DOM to create a continuously scrolling viewer. Those are both great for any file with multiple pages, but what if you want to take full advantage of more advanced file format features such as PDF bookmarks and hyperlinks?

Many applications don't bother supporting the PDF file format and assume you want to use a third party plug-in to display it. However, the LEADTOOLS HTML5 SDK includes support for not only rasterizing the PDF into an image, but also reading the text, hyperlinks and embedded thumbnails so that you can develop a fully-featured, zero-footprint PDF viewer application! Our engineers are very proud of this functionality and have created the HTML5 PDF Thumbnails and Bookmarks demo so you can see the amazing technology LEADTOOLS has to offer. Additionally, it gives you a huge head start on developing your application since the source code for this demo (and all of our other HTML5 demos) is included with the free, fully-functional LEADTOOLS Evaluation download

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from Nathan.

What is Does

This C project will perform OCR, barcode recognition and file conversion using LEADTOOLS Version 19.