Dynamic adaptation of streaming MPEG-4 video for mobile applications

With the arrival of high-speed mobile communication networks and the increase of available mobile devices, the interest in new and advanced mobile multimedia applications is rapidly increasing. However, due to the large variety of mobile terminals (such as mobile phones, laptops, ...) and, because of this, a huge collection of different terminal capabilities and terminal characteristics, it is hard to create generic mobile multimedia applications that can be used on mobile devices of different types. In this paper, we propose a mobile multimedia application that adapts its content to the capabilities of the mobile terminal and bears the typical fluctuating terminal resources into account, such as battery capacity and CPU load. To make this possible, a software framework is set up to enable negotiation between the mobile terminal and the content server. This is made possible by letting the framework be compliant to the Universal Multimedia Access framework, using Time-Dependent Metadata, and use fundamental concepts of MPEG-21. On top of that, the newly created framework is flexible, scalable, generic, and extendible. It makes it possible that multimedia applications can interact with the content provider in order to deliver an optimal multimedia presentation for any arbitrary mobile terminal at any given time, even during the actual playback of the presentation.