A characteristics-based bandwidth reduction technique for pre-recorded videos

Advances in networking infrastructures, computing capabilities, multimedia processing technologies, and the World Wide Web have brought about real-time delivery of multimedia content through the Internet. While more communication bandwidth is expected in the near future, it is either costly or unavailable to a large number of users. For important applications such as distance learning to be successful, bandwidth limitations must be taken into account. We propose a novel approach using unique characteristics of lecture videos to mitigate their bandwidth requirement for distance learning applications. The experimental results on our test videos demonstrate that when using our approach, the bandwidth requirement is reduced down to only about 4% of the video encoded in MPEG and about 13% of the same video in real format