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With the proliferation of online multimedia content and the popularity of multimedia streaming systems, it is increasingly useful to be able to skim and browse multimedia quickly. A key technique that enables quick browsing of multimedia is time-compression. Prior research has described how speech can be time-compressed (shortened in duration) while preserving the pitch of the audio. However, client-server systems providing this functionality have not been available.

In this paper, we first describe the key tradeoffs faced by designers of streaming multimedia systems deploying time-compression. The implementation tradeoffs primarily impact the granularity of time-compression supported (discrete vs. continuous) and the latency (wait-time) experienced by users after adjusting degree of time-compression. We report results of user studies showing impact of these factors on the average- compression-rate achieved …