An efficient transmission schedule writing scheme for a normal playback after interactive operations in a stored video

In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to write a transmission schedule for playback restart of a video stream at a new frame position after interactive operations such as jump or fast playback in a video-on-demand (VoD) service. The proposed scheme is based on convergence characteristics, that is, transmission schedules with different playback startup frame position in a video stream meet each other at some frame position. The scheme applies bandwidth smoothing from a new frame position to a convergence position without considering all the remaining frames of the video stream. The scheme then transmits video data according to the new schedule from the new frame position to the convergence position, and then transmits the remaining video data according to the reference schedule from the convergence position to the last frame position. In this paper, through many experiments based on MPEG-1 bit trace data, we show that there exists the convergence position corresponding to any frame position in a video stream.