every fourth frame may be recovered video buffer memory containing the state of the decompressed stream can be used during the reconstruction phase at any playback rate and thus no additional hold buffer is required decompression of a data stream encoded by the method of fig7 is illustrated in reference to fig9 the process is entered at step 122 where a rate stream supported by the video segment is selected for reproduction next with execution of step 124 the initial frame from the compressed sequence is retrieved usually directly into video buffer 36 or less usually into system memory 26 where it is decompressed then step 128 is executed to retrieve the next difference frame in the selected rate stream from the compressed sequence at step 130 the difference delta frame is decompressed directly into the display frame in video buffer 26 if present step 136 is executed to determine if the last frame for a video segment has been executed and if yes the process is exited otherwise the no branch is followed back to step 128 if some of the multiple comparison difference frames of the foregoing process are replaced with intraframes i e spatially compressed representation of frames from the original video signal the same effect is achieved.