A low cost optical storage server for near video-on-demand systems

A near video-on-demand system is one of the most economic and practical applications to provide high quality digital video services through a network in terms of cost, storage and network capacity requirements. In this paper, an optical storage server with a novel data placement and retrieval schemes is proposed for a near video-on-demand system. The proposed data placement scheme on the optical discs fully exploits the periodical broadcast characteristic of an NVOD service to optimize the disc bandwidth utilization. By further applying our retrieval schedule strategy, the buffer requirement of a system can be significantly reduced. In that way, the maximal number of supported streams with the minimal buffer requirement can be easily achieved, The storage system can be applied not only to CD-ROMs storing MPEG-1, but also to Digital Video Disks (DVDs) storing MPEG-2 in the near future