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!

Some of you may have noticed already, but our web-based .NET documentation has gone through a major renovation and upgrade. Our documentation team has been collecting feedback and requests for a while and had a chance to start implementing the enhancements after Version 18 was completed. Some of it is cosmetic, but there are some pretty neat features and user interface updates that have greatly enhanced the webhelp. Here are a few of the major features added or enhanced in the new webhelp:

• New toolbar and TOC (Table of Contents) with larger, modern icons
• Visually pleasing keyword indexes
• Embedded chat page to facilitate communication with Support
• New search options
• Smarter and more efficient TOC
  • Dynamically generated TOC increases speed and navigability
  • Persistent state remembers which branches you have opened
  • Sync button highlights where your current article is located in the TOC

• Always visible direct link to the currently displayed article for easy sharing and bookmarking
• New option to email link to the current page
• Ability to show and hide the webframe
• New icons that show which platforms are supported by a function, property or event

We hope you find the documentation more thorough and easier to navigate, giving you more time where you need it most: in your code. As always, if there are any more features you would like to see, let us know!

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.

Now that Version 18 has been out for a little over a month, we’ve received a lot of feedback about some of the features our customers are really excited about. This week I'm jumping into LEADTOOLS Multimedia Version 18, which is headlined by the addition of Media Foundation support and a new RTSP Server.

Media Foundation

LEAD Technologies has a strong record of keeping pace with the latest development platforms and technologies. Adding support for Microsoft Media Foundation is much more than just keeping up, it’s also a reflection of our commitment to making difficult development projects simple. In the same way that LEADTOOLS simplified and abstracted DirectShow application development, LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDKs now offer the same benefits for the new Microsoft Media Foundation framework with new components and transforms. Below is a list of controls, processors, codecs, multiplexers and demultiplexers that are supported in Microsoft Media Foundation: