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

Near video-on-demand system is one of the most economic and practical appli cations to provide high quality digital video services through a network in terms of cost, storage and network capacity requirements. In this paper, a n 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 charact eristic of an NVOD service to optimize the disc bandwidth utilization, By f urther applying our retrieval schedule strategy, the buffer requirement of a system can be significantly reduced, In that way, the maximal number of s upported streams with the minimal buffer requirement can be easily achieved , The storage system can be applied not only to CD-ROM's storing MPEG-1, bu t also to Digital Video Disks (DVD's) storing MPEG-2 in the near future.