Storing continuous-media data on a compact disc

Abstract.

We consider the problem of storing a given set of files containing continuous-media data on a compact disc by interleaving them so that the required total area is minimal. We show that the problem is NP-hard and consider a number of special cases. The fact that these special cases are related to well-known combinatorial optimization problems has been used in solution techniques developed to handle such cases. We propose an approximation algorithm based on these techniques for the general case.