video data rate, amount of video information to be stored, number of viewers to be served, and transmission rate, with price information to calculate the most cost-effective storage option. For most scenarios, RAM-based storage will be best for a small amount of video online with high demand and disk-only storage will be best for large quantities of video information with low demand. Regions in between these extremes will be best served by hybrid buffered-disk systems.Abstmct-This paper proposes a simple and efficient realization of letter-box conversion for displaying 1 6 9 images on a 4:3 screen. Compared to the true 16:9 letter-box display where 4:3 vertical decimation is used, the new method yields 5 3 display aspect ratio (slightly wider than 16:9 in the vertical direction) by using 5 4 vertical decimation, and enables the decimation filter to be implemented exactly and easily without multipliers. An efficient hardware architecture is also shown for implementing the proposed 5:4 decimation; in case of progressive scan, it requires only two m-bit adders and two m-hit 2:l multiplexers where m is the number of bits (typically 8) per pixel. Experiment shows little visual difference between the proposed letter-box conversion and the true 16:9 display with the 4:3 decimation.