General frame level segmentation for periodic broadcast of VBR videos

Broadcast schemes scale well in transporting popular movies in video-on-demand (VOD) systems. A large number of broadcast schemes have been proposed, a small number of which deal with the variable bit rate (VBR) encoded videos used in practice. Among them, some take the frame sequence of a VBR video into consideration. Although a few of them can achieve optimal server bandwidth under certain conditions, they cannot ensure proper decoding and full display of each downloaded segment if there are frames, for example, B frames in MPEG, that require future reference frames for decoding. Here we present a novel lossless scheme, general frame level segmentation (GFLS), to solves the above two problems. GFLS uses a segment-end-flag (SEF) sequence based on the frame interdependency to ensure continuous display of the whole video. Its important feature is that, both frame sequences in transmission order and in display order of a video have the same SEF sequence. We provide an efficient algorithm that uses the SEF sequence to implement GFLS.