MPEG-2 compliant trick play over a digital interface

Current analog and digital tape based video recorders support trick play mode such as fast search and slow- motion, it is desirable that non-tape based systems have at least the same functionality as the already existing systems. This paper presents an experimental trick-play technique that allows visual search on a remotely locate disk-based storage system connected to a digital TV via a digital interface that resembles the performance of tape-based recorders. Our concept is based avoiding intermediate transcoding of the video signal, but instead re-using the recorded MPEG-2 encoded video. This allows generation of fast search modes in forward and reverse direction, as well as slow-motion in forward direction. A special is introduced, to overcome annoying motion judder when interlaced pictures are re-displayed twice or more. Our experimental results show that the proposed reduced refresh-rate mechanism indeed shows better visual performance than a conventional system without additional processing and it copes with various real-time constraints such as bandwidth, disk seek-rate and CPU load.