Video shot boundary detection (SBD) is the first and essential step for content-based video management and structural analysis. Great efforts have been paid to develop SBD algorithms for years. However, the high computational cost in the SBD becomes a block for further applications such as video indexing, browsing, retrieval, and representation. Motivated by the requirement of the real-time interactive applications, a unified fast SBD scheme is proposed in this paper. We adopted a candidate segment selection and singular value decomposition (SVD) to speed up the SBD. Initially, the positions of the shot boundaries and lengths of gradual transitions are predicted using adaptive thresholds and most non-boundary frames are discarded at the same time. Only the candidate segments that may contain the shot boundaries are preserved for further detection. Then, for all frames in each candidate segment, their color histograms in the hue-saturation-value) space are extracted, forming a frame-feature matrix. The SVD is then performed on the frame-feature matrices of all candidate segments to reduce the feature dimension. The refined feature vector of each frame in the candidate segments is obtained as a new metric for boundary detection. Finally, cut and gradual transitions are identified using our pattern matching method based on a new similarity measurement. Experiments on TRECVID 2001 test data and other video materials show that the proposed scheme can achieve a high detection speed and excellent accuracy compared with recent SBD schemes.