Design and Architecture of the 58 Short Video SDK for Mobile Applications

Background

In the multimedia field, services have evolved from simple image‑text to video, live streaming, and now AR/VR. 58 Group’s various business lines all require short‑video capabilities (e.g., Anjuke video house tours, Car Business video previews). The 58 Short Video SDK serves as a universal video processing platform that abstracts the complex video pipeline so each business line can focus on its own product logic and quickly implement short‑video features.

Challenges of Short‑Video Apps

High technical threshold in audio‑video processing, requiring knowledge of container formats, codecs (opus, aac, h264), and frameworks such as FFmpeg.

Graphics processing demands mastery of OpenGL (OpenGLES on Android, GPUImage on iOS) and color‑space conversions (RGB/YUV) for rendering effects, filters, and transformations.

Device compatibility issues across different Android/iOS models and OS versions, affecting camera capture, hardware/software encoding strategies, and API usage.

Advanced features like beauty filters, watermarks, and special effects increase development and design costs.

Performance constraints when performing complex media capture, rendering, and encoding on mobile devices.

The SDK addresses these difficulties through a carefully considered architecture.

Design Principles and Goals

High modularity and reusability – each module is independent and plug‑in, allowing shared components (e.g., encoding) across recording, editing, and live streaming.

Decoupling from UI and business logic – the SDK isolates UI, enabling integrators to provide custom interfaces and business flows.

Extensibility – third‑party libraries (e.g., face‑recognition) can replace built‑in components, and new modules can be added without breaking existing code.

Customizable configuration – parameters such as resolution, bitrate, frame rate, codec, and filter settings are configurable.

Layered Architecture

The SDK is organized into five layers:

Business Layer : The actual application code of the integrator, where UI and specific business logic reside.

Wrapper Layer : Provides ready‑made UI wrappers (recorderWrapper, editorWrapper, playerWrapper) that expose SDK functionality through MVP patterns.

Module Layer : Offers complete video features such as recording, editing, and playback, built on top of the component layer.

Component Layer : Contains fundamental building blocks like capture, codec, and effect modules (e.g., timeline, action).

Core Layer : The core module supplies interfaces, utilities, data structures, and constants used by all other layers, analogous to a motherboard providing slots for components.

Advantages of the Architecture

Generality – supports a wide range of video functions from encoding to special‑effect processing, enabling diverse business scenarios.

Flexibility – business and wrapper layers are source‑level exposed, allowing full UI and logic customization while keeping module and component layers independent.

Reusability – components can be shared across multiple modules, reducing code duplication and simplifying maintenance.

Extensibility – new components (e.g., hardware decoder, AR, h265 codec, face‑recognition) can be added or swapped without affecting other parts of the SDK.

Future Evolution

Add hardware decoding components.

Integrate AR components.

Support h265 encoding/decoding.

Introduce face‑recognition modules.

Enable hardware decoding in recording, editing, and streaming modules.

Package new AR‑focused modules such as AR recording, AR effect editing, and AR streaming.

As hardware and software technologies advance, the SDK will continue to evolve to meet emerging challenges and provide a stable, high‑performance platform for short‑video product development.

Conclusion

The article presented the technical difficulties of short‑video applications and the comprehensive architectural design of the 58 Short Video SDK. By emphasizing modularity, decoupling, extensibility, and configurability, the SDK aims to become a universal video processing platform that supports rapid integration, high performance, and customizable features for various business lines.