Leadtools.MediaFoundation Introduction

This help file provides .NET platform information for:

LEADTOOLS MediaFoundation software development toolkits (SDKs)
LEADTOOLS MediaFoundation software development toolkit add-ons, plug-ins, and modules.

The LEADTOOLS MediaFoundation SDK is designed to provide developers with a full range of tools required to create professional, high-quality media foundation applications. With it you can add multimedia functionality such as Capture, Play, and Convert, as well as the latest Media Foundation filters and multimedia file support. You can load many common file formats, such as WAV, AVI, WMV, MPEG-2,. OGG, FLV, MKV and others. You can convert to common media foundation file formats, such as WMV, MPEG-4, and LEADTOOLS MKV.

The LEADTOOLS toolkit is flexible and gives you full control over the input, middle and output samples:

Input: Provide your own samples for conversion / playback, instead of converting a source file.
Middle: Access each sample being converted for additional processing
Output: Get each output sample and store it as needed.

Input data can come from any of the following sources:

A media file
A stream
The application, one sample at a time
A MediaFoundation Transform created manually by the application.

Data can be output to any of the following targets:

A media file
A stream
The application, one sample at a time
A MediaFoundation Transform created programmatically by the application.

The input streams can be very different (MPEG-2 Transport over UDP, TCP/IP, RTSP server feeding RTP packets, http stream, etc), but as far as your application is concerned, all you have to do is set the stream URL as the source and the toolkit handles the rest. The output is handled in the same way: set the output to a URL and the toolkit will take care of streaming the data.

The LEADTOOLS Media Foundation toolkit setup installs media sources, processors/transforms, codecs/compressors, and sinks. These filters are included with the LEADTOOLS Media Foundation SDK. In addition, these filters can be licensed individually on an a la carte basis. For more information regarding licensing, refer to the Multimedia Licensing Help.

Key Features:

Media Foundation Filters

Product Demonstrations

Requirements

Environments

Feature Diagrams

The LEADTOOLS Media Foundation toolkit provides functions that can perform the following tasks:

Media Foundation Capture:
- Create applications that can capture from a wide variety of capture devices: Media Foundation devices, HDTV, Video for Windows (VFW) devices or the computer screen
- Capture audio or video data to a file.
Multimedia Playback:
- Create applications that can play all formats supported by Media Foundation using the simple-to-use LEADTOOLS playback control.
- Play an audio, video or multimedia sample.
- Play an audio, video or multimedia file.
- Add optional processors during playback for real time processing such as deinterlacing, text or image overlay, cropping, etc..
Multimedia Conversion:
- Add features to your application that allow users to convert to and from AVI, Windows Media content, and WAVE for output.
- Convert an audio, video or multimedia file to another type of file.
- Convert using LEADTOOLS processors or your own 3rd party processors.
- Get and modify each video frame during conversion or allow the processor to modify the entire video.
- Automatically correct timestamps to produce correct output files. Converting files requires dealing with many types of files and video/audio codecs. Some of these files or codecs produce bad timestamps. LEADTOOLS can automatically handle this to produce correct output files.
Media Foundation File Formats:
- Add support for the most popular media foundation formats (MKV, MP4 and WMV).
Media Foundation Compression:
- Add support to your applications for compressing individual samples with any available Media Foundation filter.
- Specify which target video and/or audio formats to use or let the toolkit suggest video and/or audio formats appropriate for the desired file format.
- Design your own target format by picking a sink and target video and/or audio formats.
Media Foundation Processing:
- Use the LEAD Video callback transform to use any of the 200+ LEADTOOLS image processing functions to process movies during playback, conversion or capture. For more information, see the Feature Diagrams below.

Product Demonstrations

Nearly 15 example programs and executable demos are included in all LEADTOOLS products. The executable demos provide a quick and easy way to evaluate Media Foundation features and performance. Examples include:

Audio Video Play demo (player.exe)
Audio Video Capture demo (capture.exe)
Audio Video Convert demo (convert.exe)

Look for these executables in the different Bin subdirectories of the root installation directory for LEADTOOLS (for example, C:\LEADTOOLS MM XX\Bin\Dotnet4\Win32).

Audio/Video Codecs and Media Foundation Filters

The Media Foundation SDK includes release versions of many LEAD Audio/Video Codecs and filters. Click here for a complete list.

Also included are evaluation versions of the other LEAD Audio/Video Codecs and Filters. Click here for a complete list. For pricing on these Media Foundation filter client licenses, contact Sales@LEADTOOLS.com.