Axon Investigate 4.5 – (Webpage Release Notes)

Axon Investigate 4.5 introduces major platform upgrades, expanded video format support, and key workflow improvements to enhance playback reliability and evidence management.

This release upgrades the underlying video engine to FFmpeg 8 and .NET 10, improving performance overall and compatibility with a broader range of third-party video formats. For detailed format support, see the Third-Party Video Support section.

Key improvements include:

  • Faster case selection during uploads with a new searchable case field
  • More reliable multi-cam playback, preventing tile position resets
  • Improved subtitle rendering and visibility
  • Smoother playback of stitched video files with audio
  • Prevents non-media files (e.g., DLLs, IDX, text files) from cluttering investigations when importing folders and ZIP files

Overview

Axon Investigate 4.5 delivers a combination of platform upgrades and targeted fixes focused on playback stability, media handling, and investigator workflows. These updates are especially relevant for forensic workflows involving multi-source video, subtitle analysis, and evidence ingestion.

Platform upgrades

FFmpeg 8 upgrade

Updated the underlying video processing engine to FFmpeg 8, improving decoding performance, playback stability, and compatibility with modern and proprietary video formats.

.NET 10 upgrade

Migrated to .NET 10, providing improved application performance, stability, and long-term platform support.

Expanded Third-Party Video support

Added support for additional video formats and variants through decoder improvements.

See Third-Party Video Support Release Notes for full details.

Playback and media handling improvements

Improved multi-cam canvas stability

Fixed an issue where camera tile positions in the multi-cam canvas would reset when re-enabling scale inputs. Layouts now persist as expected.

Stitching playback fix (Audio-related freezing)

Resolved an issue where sequential (stitched) video files with audio could cause playback freezes or timeline jumps. Playback is now smooth and continuous.

Subtitle improvements

Subtitle placement and visibility fixes

Improved rendering of subtitle formats to ensure:

  • Correct positioning (no longer appearing mid-frame unexpectedly)
  • Consistent visibility without requiring burn-in

Evidence ingestion and file handling

Improved ignored file type handling

Fixed inconsistent behavior when importing folders and ZIP files:

  • Non-media file types (such as DLL, IDX, and text files) are now consistently ignored based on user selection
  • Prevents non-relevant files from cluttering investigations
  • Behavior is now consistent whether importing parent folders or individual folder contents

Evidence upload workflow improvements

Searchable case selection

Updated the case selection field in the Evidence upload dialog to support search.

Users with access to large numbers of cases can now quickly locate and select the correct case without scrolling through long lists.