Browsing Large Video Collections on Personal Video Recorders: Remote Control Navigation Keys do not Scale

Hard disk-based personal video recorders have the capacity to store large quantities of video contents. A personal video recorder serving one household may have to cater for the diverse entertainment tastes imposed by different family members. Timer event programmed video recordings have a tendency to accumulate and it is difficult to access large video collections on current generation personal video recorders. This is because the recordings often are presented linearly in a chronologically ordered list that is accessed using the navigation keys on a remote control. In this study an alternative strategy for accessing large video collections via the navigation keys of a remote control is investigated. The strategy automatically clusters the video recording using cuts that are perceptually meaningful to the viewers and that minimize the retrieval effort. However, the results suggest that navigation keys do not meet the needs of large video collection browsing.