LEADTOOLS Version 18 is very close, and everyone is excited around here. Our existing customers are pretty stoked as well, and this post is for them! Many of you have been asking us what upgrades will look like since we streamlined the product line to make it easier and more cost effective to get the necessary development licenses.

Who is eligible for an upgrade?

For existing customers, LEAD is making it very simple to upgrade. There is no in-sequence or out-of-sequence distinction, meaning as long as you have a valid license to an earlier version of LEADTOOLS you will receive a significant discount to upgrade. Even better, upgrading provides you with all of the new features and cross-platform development interfaces in V18, as well as the various add-on modules and plug-ins that are now bundled in at no additional cost.

We have hinted about it. We have shared bits of information here and there. And in at least one post we’ve said it was coming soon. The wait is over, LEADTOOLS 18 has been released! The new LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ native libraries for WinRT, iOS, OS X, Android and Linux are certainly the marquee update in this exciting release, but there are also many enhancements within the LEADTOOLS Document, Medical and Multimedia technology for Win32/64, .NET and HTML5.

LEADTOOLS Anywhere™

LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ extends LEAD Technologies' award winning LEADTOOLS Imaging SDKs to every major development platform. This initiative began last year with the release of SDKs for HTML5 and WinRT. The HTML5 SDKs made it possible to develop zero footprint web applications and WinRT laid the necessary foundation for porting LEADTOOLS to other native platforms. With LEADTOOLS 18, LEAD has further expanded the reach of its Imaging SDKs by offering native libraries for iOS, OS X, Android and Linux development. All core LEADTOOLS imaging technology is natively supported in each of these platforms, including viewing, annotation and markup, OCR, OMR, forms processing, 1D and 2D barcode, PDF, DICOM and support for over 150 file formats and 200 image processing functions.

The LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ cross platform libraries in LEADTOOLS V18 have been very popular since their release earlier this year. LEAD continues to expand its reach by adding new development platforms and interfaces for Windows Phone 8 and Linux.

Click on the headers below for more a more detailed list of all the features supported by each interface.

LEAD Technologies has a strong commitment to ongoing support and improvements to the current version. This isn't just the bare minimum bug fixing and workarounds like the rest, we're talking about new features and additions that are added to the toolkit at no charge or upgrade fee. Today we have released an update to the Media Foundation features within the LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK.

At first glance some of these features might not seem like much, such as a live preview for the capture and convert controls. However, anyone who has attempted low level Media Foundation programming knows this is a pretty major undertaking. The near-magical work our engineers did will save LEADTOOLS customers countless hours of headache! Here's what's new and improved for the Media Foundation SDK:

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.