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:

We hope you are enjoying all the buzz surrounding our 25 projects in 25 days. This afternoon we're making a quick interruption to announce a new Media Streaming Server video published to our YouTube channel.

This video provides an overview of the Media Streaming Server and its ability to use a single source file and stream it to multiple devices and formats such as Flash, HTML5, Apple HTTP Live Streaming, RTSP, MPEG-DASH, Adobe HDS and Microsoft Smooth Streaming.

LEAD Technologies is pleased to announce the release of the Media Streaming Server SDK. This major addition to the LEADTOOLS Multimedia product line provides a programmer-friendly library for building professional audio/video multimedia streaming applications for playback on any device.

Media Streaming Server SDK Overview

• High-level Media Streaming Server framework with minimal coding required
• Place any audio/video media file on the server and stream to any client
  • Adobe Flash RTMP — for any web browser that has Adobe Flash installed
  • Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) — for most web browsers that have Adobe Flash installed
  • Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) — for Apple iPad / iPhone and Android devices
  • MPEG-DASH — for most web browsers that have Adobe Flash installed
  • Microsoft Smooth Streaming (SSF) — for web browsers with Microsoft Silverlight installed
  • RTSP/RTP — for web browsers with the Apple QuickTime or VLC RTSP plugin installed or any application that supports RTSP
  • RTSP/RTP (MPEG-2 transport) — for web browsers with Apple QuickTime or VLC RTSP plugin installed or any application that supports RTSP
  • RTSP/RTP over HTTP — for web browsers with Apple QuickTime or VLC RTSP plugin installed or any application that supports RTSP
  • HTML5 Video — for most web browsers with HTML5 support (PC and mobile devices)
• Automatically convert videos on the fly from a single base format to minimize recompression
• Configure server settings programmatically or with XML files
  • Supports custom, application-defined properties and settings
• Monitor and manage connected users
• Flexible filters and demultiplexers allow for continuous streaming with changing formats
• Stream high-quality videos at Full HD 1080p resolution
• Broadcast audio/video content compressed with LEADTOOLS' industry-leading compression technology

Product Line Changes

Developers can acquire the new LEADTOOLS Media Streaming Server as an add-on to LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK or bundled with LEADTOOLS Multimedia Suite:

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.