MEDIA DATA ENCODING APPARATUS AND METHOD

A method and apparatus for encoding media content. In the field of video compression, temporal compression generates I-frames and dependent P-frames and B-frames. The placement of I-frames is determined by the presence of scene switches in the video. In order to improve the ability of a user to seek to interesting parts of the video, a video encoder considers semantic data identifying narrative points of interest within the video. The encoding process generates encoded video data having I-frames present at scene transitions and also at narratively interesting parts of the video.