Video transcoding to support playback at a random location for scalable video coding

In many applications including Internet video broadcast and interactive TV, video streams are transmitted over various networks. In order to fulfil the requirement of the users who want to watch a part of the video stream, start playback at a random location, and jump to another location, the service provider has to implement the random access functionality. In addition, when the video stream is transmitted over error-prone networks like wireless LAN, the random access point can be used as a recovery point which enables the user device to refresh the decoding process corrupted by the transmission error. In this paper, we propose a simple transcoding algorithm inserting the random access point in the pre-encoded video stream. The multimedia server adopting the proposed transcoding algorithm can support the error-resilient transmission as well as the playback at random location. Experimental results show that the proposed method can gain significant reduction in the complexity without introducing degradation on visual quality.