Distributed video coding (DVC) is an attractive and promising scheme that suits the constrained video applications, such as wireless sensor networks or wireless surveillance systems. In DVC, estimation of fast and consistent side information (i) is a critical issue for instant and real-time decoding. This issue becomes even more serious for high-resolution videos. Therefore, to minimise the side information estimation computational complexity, in this work, a computationally low complex DVC codec is proposed, which uses a simple phase interpolation (Phase-I) algorithm. It performs faster for all resolutions videos, and significant results are achieved for high-resolution videos with a large group of pictures (GOP). For the proposed technique, the computation time rapidly decreases with an increase in resolution. It performs 221 to 280 faster from conventional frame interpolation method for high-resolution videos and large GOP at the cost of little degradation in the visual quality of estimated side information. © 2020 Science and Information Organization.