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.

Streaming audio/video multimedia content takes a prominent place in today's culture. It is everywhere from home entertainment services, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), security and surveillance systems, and even baby monitors. What you might not know is that one format powers a large majority of those systems and products. MPEG-2 Transport Stream is at the heart of many streaming technologies you use and benefit from on a daily basis.

Naturally, LEADTOOLS has some powerful SDK features that can help you implement and take advantage of the many benefits of MPEG-2 Transport Stream. Check out this month's white paper for a detailed look into the world of MPEG-2 Transport Stream and how to use it in your application to send and receive live audio/video streams with KLV metadata, DVR and more.

MPEG-2 Transport Stream is a significant feature in our Multimedia offering and covers a wide variety of industries and applications including UAV, digital television, and security. Today, we published an update that includes the ability to use push mode to capture and play from devices sending hardware-compressed MPEG-2 Transport Streams. This heavily requested feature gives developers excellent performance when interfacing with modern MPEG-2 Transport cameras and capture devices since the source stream can go directly to the LEADTOOLS MPEG-2 Transport Demultiplexer rather than forcing decompression or being limited to completed .m2ts files.

Additional Multimedia Updates

In addition to MPEG-2 Transport Stream, here are few more notable updates in today's Multimedia Release:

LEAD Technologies has worked hard on its Multimedia SDK over the past few months, adding many new features and improvements. This plethora of updates spans across the entire gamut of technology within the Multimedia SDK including playback, conversion, codecs and much more.

• FLV playback and decoding improvements
  • Increased decoding and encoding speed
  • Faster seeking in large files
  • Improved loading speed for FLV files without duration timestamps
• Improved playback and conversion of concatenated files
  • Support for reading and writing the discontinuity flag
  • Detect concatenated files
  • More efficient memory usage and disk swapping in LEADTOOLS multiplexers
• Added support for playing RTP streams with MPEG-2 packets
• Added support for playing audio from WebM demultiplexer
• New options for controlling h.264 hardware acceleration
• Added support for styling individual words with the Text Overlay filter
• New demo showing how to implement custom video rendering such as GDI or OpenGL (available in C++, C# and VB.net)
• Added ability to create 8-bit video with custom palette
• Various new features and enhancements for the following codecs, multiplexers, demultiplexers and filters
  • MPEG-2
  • h.264
  • AAC
  • WMV
  • MPG
  • AVI
  • OGG
  • DVD

How to Get These Updates

All of these features are free for all current Version 18 customers and are available in the latest Multimedia SDK download. We hope you are as excited about these updates as we are. The majority of these features were added as a result of customer feature requests, so keep them coming!