An efficient multi-sampling strategy for interactive display in a video-on-demand server

One of the most important challenges in a video-on-demand system is to support interactive browsing functions such as fast forward and fast backward. There are several possible approaches to implementing these functions which require additional resources. Although the segment-sampling strategy proposed by Chen et al. (1995) can support browsing at any desired speed without any additional resource, this strategy only considers the display of a single continuous object at a time. In this paper, we propose a new strategy, called the multi-sampling strategy, which generalizes the approach of the segment-sampling strategy so that it can support continuous display of multiple objects at different display speed rates, simultaneously, without any additional resource.