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 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.

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from Nathan.

What is Does

This C project will perform OCR, barcode recognition and file conversion using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

Today we released several updates to LEADTOOLS Multimedia Version 19. In particular, the H.264 encoder and RTSP Source filter are faster and offer greater flexibility.

• NVIDIA CUDA hardware acceleration (NVENC) for H.264 encoder — NVIDIA's latest graphics cards and video drivers include even better hardware acceleration than the previous generation (NVCUVENC). H.265 support for NVENC acceleration is currently in beta and LEADTOOLS is excited about adding this support to our H.265 encoder in the future.
• Automatic timestamp drift correction for AAC and H.264 encoders — An incredibly useful feature for the TV industry. With video capture and DVR applications often running for days, timestamps can begin to drift resulting in out of sync audio and video streams. LEADTOOLS' AAC and H.264 encoders can now automatically detect and correct these problems when they arise in the capture hardware.
• RTSP Source Filter callback and MaxTimeout parameter — When RTSP streams encounter connection and load-time issues, both of these features make it possible for the client to abort the process manually or after a specified amount of time.
• YUV color space support in Video Callback Filter — Customers using the Video Callback filter can now work directly with YUV data without converting it to RGB.

All of these new features are freely available to those evaluating and who have already purchased LEADTOOLS Version 19. All you need to do is download the latest setup from our website!