Splicing MPEG video streams in the compressed domain

An algorithm is proposed for efficiently splicing two MPEG-coded video streams. The algorithm only processes the portion of each video stream that contains frames affected by the splice and it operates directly on the DCT coefficients and motion vectors of those frames. The algorithm achieves good visual performance with very low computational complexity, and incorporates rate control to prevent buffer underflow and overflow. If additional processing power is available, it can be used to further improve the quality of the spliced stream.