The invention discloses a terminal, a cache server and a method and apparatus for acquiring video slices, relating to the technical field of information and reducing the time delay for playing the video slices. The method includes, firstly, according to the triggering condition of an acquired video slice, determining the video slice that a terminal needs to acquire as an Nth video slice of a video file, acquiring the video index information of the video file from a cache server, determining the downloading address of the Nth video slice according to the download rate of the terminal and the video index information, sending a request message for acquiring the video slice to the cache server, wherein the request message for acquiring the video slice includes the downloading address of the Nth video slice, and at the end, receiving the Nth video slice returned by the cache server. According to the method, the source-returning probability of the cache server can be effectively reduced, and the time for the terminal to obtain the video slice is reduced.