The video is composed of many shots, which may have different brightness and main gray level. To effectively increase energy saving rate of different video, a backlight dimming algorithm based on shot characteristics is proposed. The shot segmentation is implemented by using brightness and main gray level. Then classification is performed for each shot based on its brightness and contrast. Different dimming parameters of backlight control are applied for different type of shots. The simulation results for different kinds of video show that the average detection rate is 67. 21% and the average precision is 81. 81%. An engineering prototype was developed to test different kinds of video．The result shows that the overall average energy saving rate is 24. 89%．