Improved macroblock-based reverse play algorithm for MPEG video streaming

Reverse playback is the most common video cassette recording (VCR) functions in many digital video players. However, the predictive processing techniques employed in MPEG severely complicate the reverse-play operation. In this paper, we enhance our previously proposed compressed-domain approach for the efficient reverse-play operation of an MPEG video streaming system. In the proposed video streaming server, a novel macroblock-based algorithm is used to adaptively select the necessary macroblocks, manipulate the macroblocks and send the processed macroblocks to the client machine. The proposed approach only manipulates macroblocks either on the VLC-domain or DCT-domain to achieve the server with low complexity. Experimental results show that, as compared to the conventional system and the previously proposed compressed-domain system, the new streaming system reduces the required network bandwidth and the decoding complexity significantly.