We have experimented with techniques for efficient placement of multi-resolution MPEG-2 video streams on disk array. We have demonstrated that, by integrating the placement policy with multi-resolution encoding, a server can completely eliminate the overhead of interactive scan operations (e.g., fast forward and rewind) by dynamically reducing the resolution of the streams being delivered to clients. We have generalized our method to a variety of multi-resolution compression algorithms, and demonstrated that, by tailoring the retrieval of media streams from disk to the desired resolution level, such a file system will transfer only as much data as needed, and thereby improve the utilization of both the server and network resources.

Representative Publications:

1. P. Shenoy and H.M. Vin, Efficient Support for Interactive Operations in Multi-resolution Video Servers, ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 241-253, May 1999 [ Abstract | Paper ]