In this paper, an efficient video content representation system is presented which permits automatic extraction of a limited number of characteristic frames or scenes that provide sufficient information about the content of an MPEG video sequence. This can be used for reduction of the amount of stored information that is necessary in order to provide search capabilities in a multimedia database, resulting in faster and more efficient video queries. Moreover, the proposed system can be used for automatic generation of low resolution video clip previews (trailers), giving the ability to browse databases on web pages. Finally, direct content­based retrieval with image queries is possible using the feature vector representation incorporated in our system.