The content-based information retrieval for a multimedia database uses feature information extracted from the compressed videos. This paper presents an effective method to detect scene changes from compressed videos. Scene changes are detected with DC values of DCT coefficients in MPEG-1 encoded video sequences. Instead of decoding full frames. partial macroblocks of each frame, horizontal and vertical macroblocks, are decoded to detect scene changes. This method detects abrupt scene changes by decoding minimal number of blocks and saves a lot of computation time. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed based on the precision and the recall. The experimental results show the effectiveness in computation time and detection rate to detect scene changes of various MPEG-1 video streams.