Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

On March 28, at the site of the Shenzhen Summit of Yunqi Conference, Aliyun released and demonstrated Ali Video Cloud's latest 8K Internet live broadcast solution. This is the first 8K video cloud solution released worldwide, and it is also the first 8K Internet video live broadcast in the world.

The screen of the stage shows live images and videos transmitted back from Alibaba's Hangzhou Park, 1300 kilometers away. The audience clearly saw the exquisite picture of cloisonne Taobao dolls. Overseas friends can't help but like it manually.

Below, we will explain in detail how the technology behind Ali Video Cloud 8K solution implements 8K LVB.

What is 8K? To put it simply, 8K is a clearer visual experience.

For example, full HD video, also known as 1080p, is 2 million pixels per frame. 4K is 8 million pixels per frame, while 8K is 33 million pixels.

In other words, the resolution of 8K video is 16 times that of 1080p!

You know, a full-frame SLR camera can take a picture of about 20.2 million effective pixels. Each image surpasses the full-frame SLR.

The huge number of pixels makes every frame of 8K video extremely clear. With the frame rate of 120fps, high dynamic range (HDR), wide color gamut (WCG) and other video technology, it is difficult for human eyes to distinguish the image from the real object. At a standard viewing distance, an 8K TV can provide a visual angle of up to 100 degrees, much more than the 55 degrees of 4K. With audio up to 22 channels, it can provide users with an immersive video experience and bring a strong sense of presence.

What are the applications of 8K? In addition to the experience upgrade brought about by the improved resolution, 8K video can make some new applications possible.

First of all, of course, panoramic video, virtual reality and other new immersive video applications, users can be exposed to realistic video scenes.

In addition, 8K video is also widely used in telemedicine, high-precision video surveillance and other fields. With the huge amount of information of 8K video stream, every detail of the shooting site can be retained, so that the digital remote video application can achieve the same effect as the scene.

How is 8K LVB implemented?

This 8K live broadcast mainly relies on Ali video cloud solution.

These include:

? Field collection

Each frame of the live 8K UHD video has 33 million pixels. The amount of raw video data is very large, reaching 72G bits per second. This needs to be applied to top-level hardware coding devices and coding chips.

At the same time, using the push software developed by Ali Video Cloud, the baseband data streams of video and audio collected are combined into RTMP streams on the push server and pushed to the LVB center.

? Network transmission

Network transmission is the lifeline of Internet live streaming, with a stable and high-speed network to achieve high-quality, long-distance live video transmission.

This LVB solution is applied to Aliyun video LVB, Aliyun high-speed channel and other products.

Aliyun currently provides live streaming centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Singapore, which can complete live video streaming, cloud recording, VOD and other functions. Through Aliyun CDN's more than 1300 nodes around the world, users can watch the video smoothly.

The cross-region network interconnection on the cloud can be well completed by using Aliyun high-speed tunnel between LVB centers. Through the long-term experience of live broadcasting of large-scale events and the precipitation of the system, Aliyun can monitor the live stream in real time, find the cause of stutter and solve it in time.

Alibaba Xixi Park in Hangzhou, 1300 kilometers away from the venue of the Yunqi Conference in Shenzhen, how to ensure the stable transmission of such a large amount of data over such a long distance is another difficult problem.

As shown in the figure, the live broadcast (Alibaba Xixi Park in Hangzhou) is connected to the Aliyun Network (Hangzhou) through a dedicated line, and the video cloud live broadcast center in Shenzhen is used to receive, forward and process the live stream data. Aliyun Expressway connects Aliyun (Hangzhou) and Shenzhen Video Live Center, and finally connects the audience with Aliyun (Shenzhen) CDN network through a dedicated line.

? Video playback

If you want to experience the high-definition picture quality and shock feeling of 8K video, you need strong video player ability. To ensure the high quality of this 8K video, this LVB uses an 8K player developed by Aliyun Video Cloud, which can handle bitstream buffering and resist network jitter. 8K HD playback requires strong decoding capability. Alibaba Video Cloud's self-developed 8K video playback software not only has software decoding capability, but also supports GPU hardware decoding acceleration, which can monitor the performance status of the rendering pipeline and decode in real time to ensure smooth playback.

? Computing power

To ensure the smoothness of 8K push, Aliyun has enabled a new generation of bare metal servers (Dragon) to carry high-performance computing on push servers and LVB centers.

Bare metal server (Dragon) can provide high-performance specifications with 96 cores and up to 768 GB of memory as a push server to ensure the fluency and experience of the project. The Citroen CVM used in the project is equipped with Intel Xeon Platinum 8163 (Skylake) CPU, supports 96 vCPU, and leads the industry in instance computing performance by 50%. With DDR4 memory, the data transfer speed of memory can reach 2666MT/s, and the memory bandwidth is up to 128GiB/s, which meets the requirements of 8K raw material 72Gbps and achieves a smooth experience. At the same time, Citroen supports up to 32 elastic NICs. To achieve high-availability cluster construction, low-cost failover and fine network management, support high-performance network, up to 4.5 million PPS network packet sending and receiving capacity, meet the network performance requirements of key applications, and solve the problem of packet loss from the source.

? Storage capacity

The transcoding system of 8K video needs not only high throughput storage system support, but also low-cost storage to meet the subsequent distribution and long-term storage.

In December last year, Ali Cloud Storage released Ali Cloud Storage engine 2.0, which provides up to Tb/s-level write capacity. At the same time, Cloud Storage engine 2.0 uses multi-stream parallel mapping technology, so that the throughput of cloud disk can be scaled horizontally, and the throughput greatly exceeds that of physical disk.

Aliyun's NASPlus storage series combines the high IO and high scalability of Cloud Storage engine 2.0 as well as the radio and television-level intelligent cache pre-reading technology, which greatly enhances the transcoding and non-linear coding capabilities. OSS object storage seamlessly connected with NASPlus, as the most suitable low-cost and high-throughput storage for massive audio and video, has recently launched a very fast version, which has improved its performance by an order of magnitude.

The future has come.

With the development of science and technology, our world has become wider and wider. Recall that only a few years have passed since 4K display technology first appeared, and few people remember seeing the amazing and shock of 4K at first sight.

Now 8K technology has appeared again, and everything complements each other. 8K video is more challenging for computing, storage and network than all previous video applications. The solution is based on Ali Video Cloud's leading transcoding technology, high-quality network facilities and cloud ecological partners: Advantech Technology and Suoxi Technology jointly realize, Aliyun has become the first cloud manufacturer with 8K video transmission capability in the world.

Because of belief, I saw the image of a puppet named Bill in the television system invented by British scientist Baird for the first time in the early morning of October 2, 1925.

This is the first time in human history to see the world through electrical signals. at that time, the vast majority of people in the world thought that it was impossible to record the world with electrical signals. after all, it was no more than 30 years since human beings had mastered electricity on a large scale.

Nearly 100 years later, Ali Yun announced the advent of the Internet 8K live broadcast era with a picture of a Taobao doll.

We do not need a definite answer whether it is an accident or a salute. However, it is enough that they all have one thing in common.

Because when most people believe that seeing is believing, they see because they believe.

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