LEADTOOLS Version 19 is here! In case you missed it yesterday, we talked about all the new Medical Imaging features in Version 19. To learn more about all the new features in Version 19, check out the full list.

Today, we will dive into the Multimedia and Imaging technology in LEADTOOLS 19, which is headlined by the new H.265 Codec and HTML5 Web Scanning.

A few weeks ago we announced a new MICR demo for iOS and OS X. Today we're happy to announce that the same app has been ported to Android and is now available on Google Play! MICR is useful in decoding the special fonts used on checks, making it an invaluable resource for any developer writing software for the financial sector.

As a reminder, LEADTOOLS has many additional demos available for iOS, Android, WinRT and Windows Phone including features such as OCR, Barcode, DICOM and more. If you are a mobile application developer, you can see first-hand how LEADTOOLS works on your devices. As an additional benefit, they serve as a living example of how using LEADTOOLS will have positive effects during the approval process for your app's respective stores.

LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ is still going strong and extending its reach into the native mobile app market. Today we are announcing a new demo featuring Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) technology for iOS. MICR is useful in decoding the special fonts used on checks, making it an invaluable resource for any developer writing software for the financial sector.

As a reminder, LEADTOOLS has many additional demos available for iOS, Android, WinRT and Windows Phone including features such as OCR, Barcode, DICOM and more. If you are a mobile application developer, you can see first-hand how LEADTOOLS works on your devices. As an additional benefit, they serve as a living example of how using LEADTOOLS will have positive effects during the approval process for your app's respective stores.

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!