Patent ID: 8090200

Claim:
A method, implemented on a display system having at least a display device, for previewing a video file on the display device by selecting video frames to be displayed for a preview, comprising: calculating, at the display system, differences between histograms associated with an active video frame and other frames of the video file, the calculating including determining the neighboring frame which is a frame with a difference between a histogram of the neighboring frame and a histogram of the active video frame that is closest to but greater than a predefined redundancy threshold than all the other frames, determining the neighboring frame being based on the differences previously calculated, the calculating including increasing a frame number of the next frame to be tested by a number greater than 1 when a difference between a histogram of a current frame being tested and the histogram of the active frame is less than the predefined redundancy threshold, and decreasing the frame number of the next frame to be tested when the difference between the histogram of the current frame being tested and the histogram of the active frame is greater than the predefined redundancy threshold; comparing, at the display system, at least one of the differences or a cumulative difference value representing a sum of the differences to the predefined redundancy threshold, the redundancy threshold being a time dependent variable; selecting, at the display system, particular video frames for the preview only when the at least one of said differences in the histograms of the particular video frames or said cumulative difference value exceeds the redundancy threshold so as to remove the redundancy of video frame content; adapting, at the display system, said redundancy threshold to change a speed of browsing of the preview so that fast changing content is previewed slowly with more video frames selected per unit of time in comparison to slow changing content, and slow changing content is previewed fast with fewer video frames selected per unit of time in comparison to fast changing content; and displaying the particular video frames for the preview on the display device.