Microsoft Media Foundation is rapidly gaining ground as more and more people adopt the latest Windows Operating Systems. Naturally, it is growing in popularity among our customers since we released our Media Foundation SDK earlier this year.

LEADTOOLS includes high level controls for handling all of the core Multimedia functionality such as playback, capture and conversion. More advanced applications often implement transforms (previously known as filters in DirectShow) to add special processing to the audio and video streams. One of the most popular and flexible transforms in LEADTOOLS is the Video Callback Transform, which gives you direct access to the raw video data. With that data, and one of LEADTOOLS raster, document or medical imaging SDKs, the possibilities are quite endless.

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 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.

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.