Ahlam S.A. Ansari 1 , Nafisa M. Mapari 2 Computer Engineering Department, M.H. Saboo Siddik College of Engineering Abstract Media plays a vital role in today’s world, with the advanced technologies recently developed in the areas of high-speed networks and multimedia, video-on- demand (VOD) service is considered as the emerging trend in al ways of life. Better quality video, as well as efficient way to send and receive them is necessary. Quality of video, streaming time of video and the bandwidth required makes a lot of difference. Hence we have done an empirical study of different types of batching techniques to minimize the start-up delay of video demanded. 1. Introduction Recently, video-on-demand (VoD) has become a new media service for providing entertainment to customers. In a VoD system, customers can choose a movie to watch at any time they wish via public communication network. In order to serve the customers in a strictly on demand basis, current VoD systems dedicate a transmission stream for each viewer. As a result, the network and I/O bandwidth of the server will be quickly exhausted and thus limit the number of customers served by the system. Using batching customers are grouped together. Multicasting is used to minimize the bandwidth requirement. A number of batching techniques [1]–[7] have been developed in recent few years and an empirical study have been done on different batching techniques. 2. Video-on-Demand Architecture The basic architecture of a VoD system consists of: 1. Video Encoder 2. Video Server 3. Directory Server 4. Client 5. Network The Network connects all the other VoD system components together as they are distributed geographically. The encoder accepts the video input and then uploads it on the video server after compressing/encoding the video stream received. The video server is a server with huge amount of disk space to accommodate day by day increasing videos in segments, not as a single file. The directory server keeps the index file which points to all the segments of those videos in video server, and these videos are published to the client so that they can access it. The fig 1 shows the architecture of basic VoD system. 3. Types of Video Services a. Broadcast / Multicast Video Service The multicast facility of modern communication networks [2] offers an efficient means of one-to- many data transmission. The basic idea is to avoid retransmitting the same packet more than once on each link of the network by having branch routers duplicate and then send the packet over multiple downstream branches. Multicast can significantly improve the VoD performance. Passive receive with no control except selecting the channels. One channel is needed per movie / programme. Figure 1 Broadcast / Multicast Video Service An Empherical Analysis Of Batching Policies For Distributed VoD System 390 International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) Vol. 2 Issue 10, October - 2013 ISSN: 2278-0181 www.ijert.org IJERTV2IS100085