Selective frame prefetching for reducing disk energy consumption in scalable video coding (SVC) media players

Abstract

We propose a new disk power management scheme for scalable video coding (SVC) video playback. Conventional disk power management techniques for video players usually prefetch video frames into buffer to allow disk to enter low-power mode, which may require significant buffer space. To address this, we exploit temporal scalability property in which multiple frame rates for the same video stream are provided, and allow selective frame prefetching with the aim of achieving specified quality levels while reducing disk energy consumption. Simulation results show that the disk energy consumption can be reduced by 8.4% on average without any noticeable quality degradation by users.