Frame architecture for videoservers

Video is inherently frame-oriented and most applications such as commercial video processing require to manipulate video in terms of frames. However, typical video servers treat videos as byte streams and perform random access based on approximate byte offsets to be supplied by the client. They do not provide frame or timecode oriented API which is essential for many applications. This paper describes a frame-oriented architecture for video servers. It also describes the implementation in the context of IBM's VideoCharger server. The later part of the paper describes an application that uses the frame architecture and provides fast and slow-motion scanning capabilities to the server.