Media Resource Adaptation for Multimedia Services and Streaming Media for Mobile Telephones

Nowadays an intensive diversification can be experienced among the devices that can display multimedia content to the user. Typically, clients are unable to receive large audio-visual data volumes in original quality because of resource limitations and deficiency of terminal capabilities. The aim of media resource adaptation is to provide multimedia items for users in a format that is most appropriate with respect to the current terminal capabilities, network characteristics, server capacities and user preferences. The execution time of adaptation is crucial in order to shorten startup delay. The chapter is intended to give a survey on media resource adaptation. Our aim is to introduce the related standards and specifications, show an adaptation framework. We put special emphasis on the algorithmic aspects of adaptation decision taking and present some optimization methods to efficiently select adaptation parameters.