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 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!