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LEADTOOLS Media Foundation C API Introduction

Summary

The LEADTOOLS Media Foundation C API provides developers with a full range of tools required to create professional, high-quality multimedia applications.

The API adds multimedia functionality such as Capture, Play, and Convert, as well as the latest Media Foundation filters and multimedia file support.

It allows loading and converting many common file formats, such as AVI, OGG, FLV, WMA, WMV, MP4, MKV, 3GP, MP3, WAV, FLAC, MPEG-2, and others. Or converting media to common media foundation file formats, such as AVI, WMV, MP4, MKV, 3GP, MP3, WAV, FLAC, MPEG-2, and Fragmented MP4.

Key Features

Media Foundation Capture:
- Create applications that can capture from a wide variety of capture devices: native DirectShow and Media Foundation devices, HDTV, Video for Windows (VFW) devices, or the computer screen.
- Capture audio or video data to a file.
Media Foundation Playback:
- Create applications that can play all formats supported by windows 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 overlay, rotating, etc.
Media Foundation Conversion:
- Add features to your application so your users can 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 loading the most popular multimedia formats
  - Audio Video Interleave (AVI)
  - MP3 Audio (MP3)
  - MPEG-2 Program and Transport streams
  - OGG
  - Quicktime (MOV)
  - Waveform Audio File Format (WAV)
  - Windows Media Formats (WMA, WMV)
  - MPEG 4 (MP4, AAC, AVC)
  - Flash (FLV, F4V)
  - Matroska (MKV)
  - Material Exchange Format (MXF)
  - FLAC Audio (FLAC)
  - 3GPP (3GP)
  - PSP thumbnail
- Add support for converting files to the AVI, WMV, MP4, MKV, 3GP, MP3, WAV, FLAC, MPEG-2, and Fragmented MP4 file formats.
Media Foundation Compression
- Add support to your applications for compressing individual samples with any available Media Foundation filters.
- Specify which target video and/or audio formats to use, or let the toolkit suggest target video and/or audio formats appropriate for the desired file format.
- Design your own target format by picking a sink and target video and one or more 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.

LEADTOOLS Media Foundation SDK

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

Input: Provide your own samples to the conversion/playback, instead of converting a source file.
Middle: Access each sample being converted for additional processing (see the Callback C++ demo for an example).
Output: Get each output sample and store it as needed.

Input data can come from the following sources:

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

Data can be output to the following targets:

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

The input streams can be very different (MPEG-2 Transport over UDP, TCP/IP, or RTSP server feeding RTP packets, http protocol 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.

Supported Environments.

AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is a file format defined by Microsoft. It is the most common format for audio/video data on PCs. AVI files can have one or more video streamsand one or more audio streams. The video and audio streams can be compressed using various compressors (MCMP, JPEG, MCMW, MJ2K, H263, H264, MPEG-2, MPEG-1, MPEG-4,Vorbis, MP3, AC3, AAC, and many others). Each compressed file needs a decompressor to be played or converted. This means that even though two files have the same extension they may not be similar. You might be able to play one AVI file because you have its decompressors, but you might not be able to play another because you do not have its decompressors. Or you might have the audio decompressor but not the video decompressor--in which case, you would hear the audio, but not the video. You need to have both the audio and video decompressors to play back both streams.

OGG is the name of Xiph.org's container format for audio, video, and metadata. Its default audio compressor is called Vorbis. Vorbis compression offers better quality than MP3 and yields a higher compression ratio. Ogg Vorbis is different from other formats because it is an open standard, open, and unpatented. OGG files can have oneor more video streams and one or more audio streams. The video and audio streams can be compressed using various compressors (MCMP, JPEG, MCMW, MJ2K, H263, H264,MPEG-2, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, Vorbis, MP3, AC3, AAC and many others). Each compressed file will need a decompressor to be played or converted. This means that even though two files have the same extension they may not be similar. You might be able to play one OGG file because you have its decompressors, but you might not be able to play another because you do not have its decompressors. Or you might have the audio decompressor but not the video decompressor-- in such a case, you would hear the audio, but not the video. You need to have both the audio and video decompressors to play back both streams.

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