Keyframe Thumbnail Streams for Lower Storage in Trick Mode
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing adaptive bitrate streaming systems face challenges in managing large numbers of thumbnails required for trick mode operations, leading to storage and content management issues.
Innovation Solution
The generation of thumbnail streams that include key frames separated by null frames, allowing efficient extraction and transmission during trick mode operations, synchronized with other encoded streams, and packaged in separate transport stream files.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If thumbnails are generated for every two seconds of content for a two-hour movie, then trick mode functionality is enabled, but storage requirements and content management complexity increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The video content is segmented into segments with duration equal to or greater than the keyframe interval, with each segment containing a keyframe. Thumbnails are generated only at these segment boundaries rather than continuously, reducing the total number of thumbnail files while maintaining trick mode functionality.
Solution Approach 2:
Keyframes are extracted and segments are prepared in advance during content processing, so that when trick mode is activated, pre-generated thumbnails are immediately available for display without requiring real-time processing of individual frames.
2Loss of information
If a large number of thumbnail files are stored and managed, then comprehensive coverage of content positions is achieved, but system storage resources are overwhelmed
Solution Approach 1:
The content is divided into segments where each segment contains at least one keyframe. This segmentation allows the system to store thumbnails at strategic intervals rather than continuously, achieving adequate content position coverage with significantly reduced storage requirements.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of storing every possible thumbnail frame, the system uses keyframes as representative copies that capture essential visual information at regular intervals, allowing the playback device to generate or request specific thumbnails from these keyframe-based segments as needed.
3Manufacturing precision
If thumbnails are generated continuously from video content, then high-resolution thumbnails are produced, but processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
Keyframes are extracted and prepared in advance during the content encoding phase, so that high-quality thumbnail generation is completed beforehand rather than in real-time during playback, eliminating processing delays during trick mode operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The system extracts only keyframes from the video content for thumbnail generation purposes, rather than processing every frame. This extraction approach maintains thumbnail quality while dramatically reducing the computational burden and processing time required.
Data Source
AI summary
Apparatus and methods for thumbnail generation. In one embodiment, a thumbnail stream is generated where one or more bits are assigned to key frames and minimizes the number of bits assigned to delta frames. Each key frame may be used to extract a still image for use in thumbnails during trick mode operation (e.g., fast forward, rewind, pause, or random seek operation). When the encoded video file is given to a Just in Time Packager (JITP), the JITP extracts the image files (via the key frames). Information regarding how to reference these files is stored in generated manifest file and may be reformatted by the JITP to fit the needs of the current product. In a variant, the JITP reformats the image files extracted from the encoded video for operation on a number of devices.