Disk-oriented VCR operations for a multiuser VOD system

Future high-speed computer networks are projected to carry dizzying array of networked multimedia applications including digital libraries, video and image servers, distance learning collaboration, networked virtual environments, and entertainment. A common threat to these applications is the so-called continuous nature of the data. Video-on-demand (VOD) application is a networked multimedia application where the subscribers access a remote server for the multimedia data preferably with VCR operations. These operations impose additional resource requirement on the VOD server in terms of storage space, retrieval throughput and network resources like bandwidth and buffers. In this work, we propose a cost-effective disk-oriented multi-user play-out system with VCR operations. The system uses segmentation of multimedia data into small segments and provides segment-skip mechanism for VCR operations and implementation.