Multimedia adaptation in end-user terminals

In the last few years, considerable research efforts have been spent on the concept of adaptation at various points in the digital information distribution chain, from content/service generation to end-user terminals. The purpose of these efforts is to realize the Universal Media Access (UMA) vision, which means access to content by any terminal and any network. The quality of the user experience then depends on the effectiveness of the multimedia customization process. Complementary to these efforts, this paper addresses the problem of adapting the playback of a multimedia application in multimedia end-user terminals by (1) showing its relationship with MPEG-21 concepts, (2) framing it in the context of terminal Quality of Service (QoS), (3) presenting a complete framework based on the MPEG-4 systems’ architecture and (4) finally presenting some results.