A Proposed Scheme Based On SP/SI Frame For H.264/AVC Video Streaming With VCR Functionalities

With the proliferation of online video, it is important to provide full VCR functionalities for user to browse video content. The set of full VCR functionality includes forward, fast-forward, backward, fast-backward, setp-forward, step-backward, random access, pause, and stop operations. These functionalities can support quickly and user friendly browsing multimedia contents for users and other applications.However, the full VCR functionality of video stream is not easy to implement. The main video compression technology is based on motion compensated predictive coding with the I-B-P frame structure. A stop, pause, or forward play is relatively easy to realize, but imposes several constraints on other VCR functionalities such as random, backward play, fast-forward play, and fast-backward play. Straightforward implementation of these functions requires much higher network bandwidth and decoder complexity compared to those required for the regular forward play function. While the network bandwidth and the decoder complexity are still insufficient resource nowadays. So the main research work of this paper is how to implement the VCR functionality of video stream with least network bandwidth and decoding effort. In order to conquer these shortcomings of current technologies to implement the VCR functionality, in this paper, we proposed a scheme that utilizes the SP/SI frame to implement the VCR functionality of H.264/AVC video. The main feature of SP frames is that identical frames can be reconstructed using different reference frames for their prediction. Using H.264/AVC SP/SI frames to implement the VCR functionality can eliminate the drifting problem of dual-bitstream technique and don't need to store the dual-bitstream, so that it can effectively reduce the sended frame and stored frame. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce about 70%-80% of network bandwidth and improve PSNR 1dB under VCR operation than dual-bitstream scheme.At the end of this paper, we utilize the technology of SOCKET and SDL multimedia development kit to develop a C/S system. This system simulates the VOD system and can implement the VCR functionality of video streams.