AI Technology Behind the Live Streaming Quality of “Black Myth: Wukong”Comparable to Native Game Effects

"Black Myth: Wukong" was released on August 20, 2024, and the total sales exceeded 4.5 million copies on the first day of launch, and within 3 days, the sales across all platforms broke through 10 million, making it one of the fastest-selling games of all time.

After the official release of the domestically produced phenomenal game "Black Myth: Wukong", its popularity continues to rise. In addition to the global success of the game itself, "Black Myth: Wukong" has also sparked a trend on social media. Especially on live streaming platforms where gamers gather, various streamers have confronted their destiny on the journey westwards!

However, many viewers find that the live streaming quality of many hosts is blurry, with details lost and poor visual experience. As the cloud live processing service provider that carries the largest live streaming traffic on the entire network and supports over 50% of the real-time media processing volume, Tencent Cloud Media Processing Service (MPS) detected this situation in real-time through its media quality inspection capabilities. Immediately, it optimized the existing AI enhancement model based on the issues found in the quality inspection and the characteristics of the "Black Myth: Wukong" visuals. Combined with Top Speed Codec transcoding and ultra-high-definition quality enhancement technologies, it intelligently restored the lost texture details during transcoding, helping the live streaming platform to achieve a significant improvement in the live streaming quality of "Black Myth: Wukong" in a short time.

Challenges

• High bit rate: Ultra-high-definition game visuals, such as 4K@120FPS live videos, have extremely high bit rates, reaching hundreds of Mbps.
• Network bandwidth limitations: The transmission of high bit rate videos is constrained by network bandwidth.
• Terminal performance limitations: The performance of end-user devices can also limit the transmission of high bit rate videos.
• Real-time encoding and compression: To meet transmission requirements, videos need to be encoded and compressed in real time, which can be computationally intensive and challenging to achieve without quality loss.

But compression will cause distortion, especially for games like "Black Myth: Wukong" with complex scenes and rich details, the image quality is more likely to be lost during the encoding and compression process, leading to problems such as blurring and artifacts.

The combination of Tencent Cloud Media Processing service's real-time quality inspection, Top Speed Codec transcoding, and ultra-high-definition quality enhancement can monitor the live broadcast situation 24/7 in real time, detect image quality problems in real time, and quickly improve image quality performance through targeted optimization of the AI enhancement model, helping the platform to maintain the best image quality at all times.

Real-time quality inspection and evaluation can quickly locate picture problems

In the live streaming craze of "Black Myth: Wukong", relying on the MPS media quality inspection capabilities, we detected fluctuations in the quality of the live broadcast picture in real time, found the image quality problems in the live broadcast of "Black Myth: Wukong", and quickly optimized the model based on the data and analysis results of media quality inspection monitoring, helping the platform to solve related problems. Tencent Cloud MPS provides a variety of quality inspection functions such as media format diagnosis, playback compatibility analysis, image quality inspection, no-reference image quality scoring, and video evaluation, and automatically monitors live broadcast quality and alarms 24/7.

MPS Media Quality Inspection confirms whether the media meets its intended use by detecting various possible issues, mainly including Technical Issues and Content Issues. These issues include:

• Compliance with specifications
• Correct file type
• Correct timestamps
• Video errors (color gamut, artifacts, jitter, blurring, low light, overexposure, black/white edges, black/white/screen, noise, mosaic, etc.)
• Audio errors (loudness, clicks, silence, etc.)

In addition, apart from detection, Media Quality Inspection also provides corresponding repair suggestions and solutions in conjunction with related functions.

Leading encoding capabilities, saving half the bandwidth, and delivering higher-definition images

The loss of image quality in live streaming mainly comes from encoding and compression, and encoding capabilities largely determine the image quality of live streaming. Tencent Cloud MPS's Top Speed Codec transcoding can significantly reduce the video bit rate without compromising or even improving the visual perception of the human eye. It can achieve higher-definition picture effects while saving 50% bandwidth, with a VMAF score increase of 3 to 5 points. It supports real-time encoding of high-resolution videos up to 8K, integrating super-resolution, SDR2HDR, and color enhancement technologies to provide an extremely clear viewing experience.

Deeply customized AI enhancement algorithms, significantly improving audio and video quality

In addition to the ultimate encoding capabilities, Tencent Cloud MPS also provides powerful audio and video AI enhancement algorithms and a wealth of business scenario application models. The enhancement model can flexibly adjust and optimize according to the media quality inspection monitoring data for different situations, keeping the live streaming image quality at its best at all times.

We provide a one-stop audio/video solution covering Encoding, Enhancement, Stream, Playback, and more.

Industry-leading technologies provide a competitive edge in entertainment, social networking, education, gaming, live streaming, and other applications.

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