SBA: a server-initiated playback scheme supporting variable bit rate control

To support efficient multimedia retrieval, the multimedia server usually store a large volume of multimedia data in a compressed form, such as in the MPEG format for video and audio data. However, the variable bit rate (VBR) of MPEG movies is a serious problem for a system supporting video-on-demand services (VOD). We propose a smoothing by block adjustment (SBA) scheme to deal with the VBR problem based on the physical storage of multimedia data by a block. If we reduce the frequency of rate adjustment for all movies in a VOD system, we can eliminate much of the useless overhead of the server or network resource adjustment in a VOD system. We show that our SBA scheme can solve VBR problems without incurring much complexity and efficiently reduce frequent rate adjustment for a movie playback