It has been nearly a month since Alibaba Cloud Narrowband HD 2.0 was officially released at the Yunqi Conference. During this period, many customers have been accessing and using it, including Hangzhou Toto Network Technology Co., Ltd. Its product Finger is a mobile APP focusing on online music education. It provides online courses and services to users who need professional music education to help them realize their music dreams. At present, the total number of users of the product is 13 million, and it has been located in the APP STORE Music for a long time. Top 20. In this article, we talked to Lin Rongkun, the co-founder and CTO of Finger, and listened to him share his story with Alibaba Cloud.
Video education started with a focus on Alibaba Video Cloud
When talking about the early days of Finger's founding, Lin Rongkun said: "It was in 2014, because the audio and video players and processing at that time were far from being as rich and complete as they are today, so they encountered many challenges. At that time, only open source servers were available. ffmpeg can be chosen. Later, the OSS function of Alibaba Cloud was gradually opened in the cloud. During this period, the team also learned about a commercial player, Vitamio, which had many problems and high licensing fees. Next, the iOS selection team has developed it by itself, and Android is customized based on Google's open source player exoplayer."
It is in such a situation where difficulties and challenges coexist that the technology has also gone through layers of tests by the market and users. Finger's main focus is to provide free online video teaching of various musical instruments for users with different needs. Video service has become the most basic and critical part of the product. Therefore, Lin Rongkun's team has been looking for a way to not only improve the user's viewing experience, but also save the cost of video bandwidth. When they saw that Alibaba Video Cloud had launched Narrowband HD 2.0, they felt that the opportunity had come, so they immediately tried it on the playback course, and found that the effect of repairing the originally compressed teaching course video was quite good, so they decided to formally accept it. enter.
Lin Rongkun said: "The main scenario of narrow-band HD is that our video-on-demand service can save CDN costs, and the image quality regeneration is used for our playback video recording, which is relatively blurry. I hope that through the image quality regeneration to high-definition, we can give our users more Good service experience. As far as we know, there are very few companies offering this service on the market today, and it is rare for Alibaba Video Cloud to open up this capability.”
Access Narrowband HD 2.0 to restore clear picture quality and improve user experience
Finger's video content processing process includes watermarking, screenshots, transcoding, and multi-rate slicing. We use the image quality regeneration function in the transcoding part. There is not much difference between the architecture before and after access, because the image quality regeneration is only video, so there is basically no coupling. It took about a week for the official access to be connected. It took several steps to activate the media transcoding service, set the input and output media buckets, configure the media workflow, and select the Narrowband HD 2.0 transcoding template at the transcoding node. Regarding the overall experience, Lin Rongkun said: "There will also be some customized things that need to be configured by contacting Alibaba Cloud technical personnel. The whole process is very smooth, and there are no problems."
Finger is connected to Narrowband HD 2.0. Its principle is to start from the visual model of the human eye and adjust the optimization goal of the encoder from the classic "highest fidelity" to "best subjective experience". With the unique algorithm, it can provide a clearer video viewing experience while saving the bit rate. For Finger's business scenarios, the image quality regeneration of Narrowband HD 2.0 - the source repair function, can automatically detect the source condition of the over-compressed network video, remove the glitches and mosaics in the video picture, and generate a higher-definition video. Repair the remake to restore the user look and feel of low-quality film sources.
Talking about the effect after the connection, Lin Rongkun said that during the period after the connection, users often reported that the playback video was clearer, and the experience was much better. Moreover, after use, it is equivalent to reducing the company's CDN bandwidth cost through technical means without losing user experience.
Build products on top of Alibaba Cloud's many cloud computing products
Because Finger is an audio and video business scenario and needs to accelerate the distribution of content, in addition to Alibaba Video Cloud's narrowband HD 2.0 product, the team also chose Alibaba Cloud's CDN service, which has many nodes and good stability. In addition, because copyright content is very important for the education industry, Finger also adopts https security acceleration to protect video content from being stolen and misused.
At the same time, we also learned that Finger products are basically built on Alibaba Cloud's many cloud computing products, such as ECS, RDS, SLB, and VPC. This is the same as most Internet companies in Hangzhou. Relying on Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure, or selecting products or solutions that meet your needs, you can quickly realize product capabilities and seize this rapidly changing era. At the end of the dialogue, we talked about our views on cloud adoption by enterprises, Lin Rongkun said: "My view is that in the future, the underlying technical facilities and cloud computing products will become more and more abundant, stable and cheap, and enterprises can pay more attention to resources. In the realization of core business value, we are either embracing cloud computing or on the way to embrace cloud computing.”
Indeed, as Lin Rongkun said, when your business is in a stage of rapid development, the technical and product teams need to spend more energy on solving core business needs and product logic, while ensuring business stability through mature third-party solutions on the market. and improve service quality. For the video education industry, the bandwidth cost and user experience of video content are the two parts that enterprises are most concerned about. Then, using Alibaba Video Cloud Narrowband HD 2.0, these two points can be balanced. At present, Narrowband HD 2.0 has been open for public beta testing on Alibaba Cloud's official website. If necessary, you can log in and apply for a trial. At the same time, we also believe that in the future, Alibaba Cloud and Finger will provide users with better-looking video content through more in-depth and close cooperation.