Balancing disk energy against reliability in video playback

Minseok Song, Wanhyung Ryu, Jeong Seop Sim, Yeongju Lee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Video files contain large amount of data, which can be stored cost-effectively on a hard disk drive, but this consumes a significant energy when it is spinning and ready to read data. The energy used by a disk can be reduced by prefetching video frames into buffer to allow the disk to spin down. But frequent spindowns compromise disk life, so it is desirable to limit the number of times that the disk spins down. We propose a method of data prefetching that fully utilizes the available buffer while providing continuous video playback. We analyze the effect of the amount of data comprising the frames in the buffer on disk power consumption and formulate algorithms that determine when the disk should enter standby mode and the optimal number of disk spindowns. We implemented our scheme in the Linux 2.6 MPlayer and find that a portable 1.8-inch disk uses between 10 and 37 % less energy than it does with the existing MPlayer.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)25-43
Number of pages19
JournalMultimedia Systems
Volume20
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2014

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology under grant 2012R1A1A2005787, in part by the industrial strategic technology development program (10041971, Development of Power Efficient High-Performance Multimedia Contents Service Technology using Context-Adapting Distributed Transcoding) funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE, Korea), and in part by an Inha University Research Grant.

Keywords

  • Disk energy
  • Disk reliability
  • Linux MPlayer
  • Low-power software
  • Video playback

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